nickw@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Nick Watkins) (06/12/90)
I find myself in the position of having to read optical disks written to a Unisys WORM drive (SD1-WRM) by a Unisys PC, referred to (by USAF I think) as "Desktop III". I want to make this operation as as transparent as possible to my main machine, an HP 9000 cluster consisting of an 835 server, 3 diskless 340 clients, and a 340 with an HP 650A rewritable optical drive ( this last machine is in somebody's office & is thus not a good way to read disks, it is also not part of the cluster for reasons recently discussed in this group). I plan to read the disks by attaching another Unisys drive to a Vectra QS20 which will then have to be attached somehow to the 9000 to make the files generally available. My questions are as follows : 1) is there an HP WORM drive compatible with the Unisys SD1 ? If not, is there a 3rd party drive (Panasonic ?) that is ? We anticipate problems getting the drive from Unisys as it is very new & our partners have not received theirs yet . 2) can the Vectra work with an SCSI WORM drive in general, and with the Unisys SD1 in particular ? Can it do so under MS-DOS or would we have to run some form of Unix on it ? 3) What is the best way to connect a Vectra to a 9000 series network ? Our scheme is an ethernet card (3com "Etherlink" ?) & an Ethernet line to our main cluster which is already on the ampus Ethernet. Is this the best way ? All replies appreciated, especially those exposing/reducing my ignorance of things optical & MS-DOS. Nick -- Dr. Nick Watkins, Space & Plasma Physics Group, School of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton, E.Sussex, BN1 9QH, ENGLAND JANET: nickw@syma.sussex.ac.uk BITNET: nickw%syma.sussex.ac.uk@uk.ac