mckenney@talos.pm.com (Frank McKenney) (03/30/90)
The following is a description of one user's experience with
installing a Seagate ST-296N drive. It is offered on the principle
that an ounce of "Working Example" is worth several tons of
"Theory" or "Rumor".
Late last year I decided that, by the end of 1990, I wanted to be
able to boot OS/2 on my office system. At the time I was running
DOS 3.3 on an Everex System 1800A (10 MHz/1ws AT clone), with 1 Mb
RAM and an Everex FD/HD Adapter attached to ST-225 and ST-251-1
MFM drives. Since I only had about 5 Mb free on the two drives
combined, and since I would need 10 Mb for OS/2 Standard Edition,
I needed to upgrade the ST-225 to something larger.
Looking at the available drives in the 60-80 Mb range, Hard Drives
International's Seagate ST-296N SCSI drive/Seagate ST01 Host
Adapter for $499 looked like a good deal.
Seagate offers two 8-bit SCSI Host Adapters: the ST01, which
handles hard drives only, and the ST02, which is a combined floppy
drive/SCSI controller. Since I wanted to add a third floppy drive,
I ordered the ST02 controller with my ST-296N.
This turned out to be a mistake. The floppy disk controller logic
on the ST02 <conflicts> with the logic on an MFM FD/HD Adapter,
and neither the ST02 nor my Everex FD/HD Adapter allow the floppy
controller logic to be defeated. Since I wanted to keep the Everex
adapter in place for the ST-251, I shipped the ST02 back to HDI
via Federal Express to exchange for an ST01.
Three weeks and five telephone calls later, I finally received my
ST01 (it was another week before I got the credit amount
corrected).
Installation was not painful. The Seagate ST01/ST02 manual was
reasonably clear on the various jumpering options; the worst
single problem was folding and routing the SCSI ribbon cable (50
conductors - 50% wider than the large MFM cable). I took the
precaution of printing off a copy of the CMOS configuration
information before starting, a step I would strongly recommend
(let's see... was drive C configured as a type 87, or what?). The
ST01 SCSI BIOS is independent of the MFM controller, so my final
CMOS configuration showed drive C as a type 40, and <no> drive D
installed.
Following standard rule of never upgrading hardware and software
at the same time, I chose to stick with DOS 3.3 and go with
multiple partitions rather than use the supplied On-Trak
partitioning software or upgrade to DOS 4.0 and its large
partition support. This was my first experience with partitioning
more than one drive; DOS's choice for selecting drive IDs came as
a bit of a surprise. I now have 5 HD partitions: C: and E: on the
ST-251, and D:, F:, and G: on the ST-296N.
Yes, Virginia, you <can> run MFM and SCSI together. After 6 weeks
of operation, I have experienced no problems with either the ST-
296N or the ST-251. I did have to call HDI technical support about
the "funny noise" coming from the drive every 5 minutes. This
turns out to be the drive auto-parking (but this little gem is not
mentioned in either the Seagate or the HDI manual). HDI says the
next version of the drive manual will contain this information.
Since the ST01/ST02 adapters are 8-bit cards, they should work
equally well for an XT-type machine.
I can offer no comments on how well the ST01 controller functions
under OS/2 or UNIX. Has anyone tried this?
Frank McKenney
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