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1.4
Overview of Product
The Adaptec ACB-232XD is a series of high-performance ESDI Hard Disk and Floppy Disk
Controllers for the IBM PC AT and equivalent personal computers.
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The ACB-2320D is an ESDI hard disk controller.
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The ACB-2322D is an ESDI hard disk and floppy disk controller.
The ACB-232XD is software and hardware compatible with the IBM PC AT hard disk
controller interface.
The Adaptec ACB-232XD ESDI Controllers have the following features:
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IBM hardware compatible. Plugs directly into AT bus compatible systems without
modification. Register (port) compatible to the IBM AT controller, giving true
compatibility.
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IBM software compatible.
system BIOS or directly to the controller registers, thus, the highest AT
compatibility is achieved.
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Supports two enhanced small disk interface (ESDI) drives. Runs hard-sectored 10,
15 and 20 MHz ESDI drives from all major ESDI manufacturers. Supports two
drives that are different capacity, different access time and different manufacturers
without controller modification. Drives with up to 16 heads and 4096 cylinders are
supported by the controller through the registers.
capacity and highest performance.
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Highest AT ESDI performance. The combination of non-interleaved operation and
low controller overhead give the ACB-232XD the highest transfer rate available
today. This is from 900 Kilobytes per second to as high as 1.9 Megabyte per
second data transfer depending on system configuration.
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Non-interleaved operation. This gives the ability to read one track of data in one
disk revolution, the maximum rate that the drive can give data to the controller.
This provides the fastest controller/drive performance.
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Can support more than 1024 cylinders under DOS. Breaks the INT 13, 1024
cylinder, limit. Drives up to 528 MBytes can be supported by translating the
cylinder count.
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Can support up to 1 Gigabyte under DOS. Adaptec's drive-splitting feature allows
one large physical drive to be split into two "logical" drives and run as a C & D
drive under DOS without installing driver software.
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Sector-sparing. One sector per track can be reserved as a spare. If a defect is
found during format, the track will be re-formatted using the spare. Then the drive
will be defect free under DOS.
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17 sector translation. The controller can emulate a 17 sector format for software
such as Novell that requires that feature.
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64 K Byte buffer. A 64 K buffer is standard on the ACB-2322D. 64K can cache a
full track for the large new drives with up to 72 sectors per track; 32K cannot.
Under DOS or OS/2, there can never be a host overrun condition, because their
maximum request block size is 64K. Even if the host CPU is too busy to process
(http://www.franken-online.de/ymmv)
ACB-232XD User's Manual
Runs software that communicates through the AT
Provides both the highest
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