Hard Drive

• Manufacturer: Micropolis

• Supplier: Simply Computers

• Model: 3243AV (Fast SCSI-II AV Enhanced)

This is the hard drive I used to use in my 486.  It has a capacity of 4.0GB formatted.  It runs extremely hot if it's been on for an hour or two.  Due to its depth, I could not install this into the hard drive bracket on my Panrix case, so I have it in one of the 5.25" expansion bays.

Performance is good for what I need.  Norton System Information and Adaptec SCSIBench32 (part of EZ-SCSI) report the speed of this drive as:

• Norton
  3.8MB/s physical throughput
  28MB/s cached throughput
  
• SCSIBench32 (using 64KB transfer size)
  2.1MB/s random I/O
  6.6MB/s sequential I/O
  3.7MB/s same sector I/O

The Norton result for cached throughput seems to make a mockery of benchmarking, but I tend to agree with the other results.  The drive is specified as having a sustainable transfer rate from 4MB/s minimum up to 7.2MB/s, although this is an AV enhanced drive.

Since I have had this drive I have never been able to work out how to remove termination for the SCSI bus.  The jumpers referred to in the manual do not appear to exist.  This means I have a tangled mess of ribbon cable to allow the drive to be the last device on the bus (after the CD-ROM), as you can see on the left.