[comp.sys.amiga] CDC 150 Meg SCSI drive on A2000

cg@myrias.UUCP (Chris Gray) (11/11/88)

The company I work for is trying out some CDC SCSI drives for use with Sun
3/50 workstations. When a bunch arrived last week, I was able to borrow one
for a tryout. After finding a SCSI cable that works (borrowed from a friend's
TRS-80 model 16), I hooked it up to the 2090 in my Amiga 2000 (I had to use
the connector for internal SCSI drives, and run the cable out through a back
cutout to the drive box). I cooked up a pair of MountList entries for it (one
for RES2:, one for Big:, which is an FFS partition of the rest of the disk,
except for a 2 cylinder dh2:), and fired it up. The documentation with it
said that it was already formatted with 512 byte sectors for Sun UNIX, so
I figured I'd try a "format quick", to avoid the long wait. Asside from the
'prep' taking over 10 minutes (peculiar, since it didn't seem to be doing
and disk I/O during that time), everything worked perfectly. Unfortunately, I
don't seem to have 'diskperf' anywhere, so I can't do accurate measurements
on the drive, but it seems to be about the same speed as my internal ST506
20 Meg drive, which is also FFS. The only problems I have are that the drive
is too big (as deep as the 2000, almost as high, and 8" wide), and FAR too
noisy - it sounds very similar to the LearJet in FS-II!

In summary: great job Commodore! - totally unknown hard disk from unpacking
to full operation in 20 minutes!

Here's the technical details:

	Control Data full height 5-1/4" SCSI 150 Meg drive (Wren III ?)
	961 cylinders, 9 heads, 35 sectors per track, interleave 1

and here's my MountList entries:

/*
 * Reserved tracks for SCSI disk.
 */

RES2:	Device = hddisk.device
	Unit = 3
	Flags = 0
	Surfaces = 9
	BlocksPerTrack = 35
	Reserved = 2
	Interleave = 1
	LowCyl = 0 ; HighCyl = 1
	Buffers = 1
	BufMemType = 0
#

/*
 * The remainder (except for dh2:) of the hard disk.
 */

Big:	Device = hddisk.device
	Unit = 3
	Flags = 0
	Surfaces = 9
	BlocksPerTrack = 35
	Reserved = 2
	Interleave = 1
	LowCyl = 4 ; HighCyl = 960
	Buffers = 50
	BufMemType = 0
	GlobVec = 1
	FileSystem = L:FastFileSystem
	DosType = 0x444F5301
#

Now if I could only figure out a way for the company to "forget" that I still
have the drive!

-- 
Chris Gray		Myrias Research, Edmonton	+1 403 428 1616
	{uunet!mnetor,ubc-vision,watmath,vax135}!alberta!myrias!cg