kdq@demott.COM (Kevin D. Quitt) (07/06/90)
As we are rapidly running out of space on our measly 300M disk, I
would like to add one of the attractive (very large capacity) SCSI disks
that are available for outside vendors (i.e. not Motorola). Has anyone
done this? Is a new driver required? My understanding is that is should
be fairly easy to do, but that the new disk can't be (easily) made to be
the system device (I don't care about that).
Any comments from the (heretofore very helpful) Moto folk?
--
_
Kevin D. Quitt demott!kdq kdq@demott.com
DeMott Electronics Co. 14707 Keswick St. Van Nuys, CA 91405-1266
VOICE (818) 988-4975 FAX (818) 997-1190 MODEM (818) 997-4496 PEP last
96.37% of all statistics are made up.heiby@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com (Ron Heiby) (07/19/90)
The most common experience that our customers seem to have when they try to save a few bucks by integrating their own disk drive is that they are surprised by how much work it *really* would have saved if they had just bought a drive from us. All the tools are there to integrate foreign drives into the system. But, if you buy ONE disk drive from a manufacturer, how likely do you think they will be to act quickly to fix an incompatability in their firmware? Don't "cut off your nose to spite your face". Take the easy way out. You'll be glad you did. -- Ron Heiby, heiby@chg.mcd.mot.com Moderator: comp.newprod "Mandatory Drug Testing? Just Say NO!!!"
rzh@lll-lcc.UUCP (Roger Hanscom) (07/19/90)
In <41276@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com> heiby@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com (Ron Heiby) writes: >The most common experience that our customers seem to have when >they try to save a few bucks by integrating their own disk drive >is that they are surprised by how much work it *really* would have >saved if they had just bought a drive from us. All the tools are >there to integrate foreign drives into the system. But, if you >buy ONE disk drive from a manufacturer, how likely do you think >they will be to act quickly to fix an incompatability in their >firmware? Don't "cut off your nose to spite your face". Take >the easy way out. You'll be glad you did. >-- >Ron Heiby, heiby@chg.mcd.mot.com Moderator: comp.newprod >"Mandatory Drug Testing? Just Say NO!!!" Experience makes me want to let this one go flying by, but it sticks in my throat too much. [flame on] If "all the tools are there to integrate foreign drives into the system", then integrating foreign drive into the system shouldn't be a problem. This "buy it from us at 2x, 3x, 10x .... the market price because it's easier" attitude is too common with vendors (particularly the three letter ones..ahem). IMHO, if a customer wants to buy from the vendor (for what- ever reason...easier, h/w maint,, less paperwork,....etc.) fine, but a vendor should also provide whatever it takes to make their h/w work with 3rd party stuff in the market. I can see them not making it terribly easy, but they shouldn't make it hard either. "The easy way out" may not be an option for lots of folks! [flame off] roger rzh@lll-lcc.llnl.gov
stefan@yendor.UUCP (Stefan Loesch) (07/21/90)
In article <3098@lll-lcc.UUCP> rzh@lll-lcc.UUCP (Roger Hanscom) writes: > >In <41276@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com> heiby@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com (Ron Heiby) >writes: > >>The most common experience that our customers seem to have when >>they try to save a few bucks by integrating their own disk drive >>is that they are surprised by how much work it *really* would have >>saved if they had just bought a drive from us. All the tools are > >[flame on] >If "all the tools are there to integrate foreign drives into the system", >then integrating foreign drive into the system shouldn't be a problem. >This "buy it from us at 2x, 3x, 10x .... the market price because it's >easier" attitude is too common with vendors (particularly the three letter >ones..ahem). IMHO, if a customer wants to buy from the vendor (for what- >ever reason...easier, h/w maint,, less paperwork,....etc.) fine, but a >vendor should also provide whatever it takes to make their h/w work with >3rd party stuff in the market. I can see them not making it terribly >easy, but they shouldn't make it hard either. "The easy way out" may not >be an option for lots of folks! >[flame off] This are just two sides of coin, each with it's own merrit. Ron is talking from a commercial customers point of view (that's what he deals with) whereas Roger takes the stance of some private person or student at a college (yes, those also are customers, even if big companies more often than not seem to forget that). To get back to the technical side: It MAY be possible. Depends how close to the standard the drive is. I've seen drives that didn't even require a new dskdefs file, and I've seen some that required firmware changes. If firmware changes are necessary you're completely out of luck. My advice is, if you've a drive lying around anyway and some time, give it a try. If you have to buy a drive make sure you can give it back if it doesn't work (more likely than not). Start out by hooking the drive up, and see if it responds to BUG commands. If it does, create a new dskdefs file (ddefs -n NEWNAME) to format the drive (dinit -f NEWNAME RAWDEVICE) and to create filesystems (sledit RAWDEVICE). A good practice after formating also is to try a complete read of your drive (dd if=RAWDEVICE of=/dev/null bs=64k). I often catch (and subsequently lockout with dinit -n NEWNAME RAWDEVICE) additional bad spots which the formatting didn't get. WARNING ! If you don't know EXACTELY what you're doing, leave your fingers off. You may crash your system (with all software gone!) Even if you know what you're doing, make a complete backup before you start, it's just to easy to destroy something. Stefan stefan@phx.mcd.mot.com
michael@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com (Ron Heiby) (07/23/90)
Roger Hanscom (rzh@lll-lcc.UUCP) writes: > In <41276@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com> heiby@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com (Ron Heiby) > writes: > >The most common experience that our customers seem to have when > >they try to save a few bucks by integrating their own disk drive > >is that they are surprised by how much work it *really* would have > >saved if they had just bought a drive from us. All the tools are > >there to integrate foreign drives into the system. But, if you > >buy ONE disk drive from a manufacturer, how likely do you think > >they will be to act quickly to fix an incompatability in their > >firmware? Don't "cut off your nose to spite your face". Take > >the easy way out. You'll be glad you did. > Experience makes me want to let this one go flying by, but it sticks in > my throat too much. > [flame on] > ... > This "buy it from us at 2x, 3x, 10x .... the market price because it's > easier" attitude is too common with vendors (particularly the three letter > ones..ahem). IMHO, if a customer wants to buy from the vendor (for what- > ever reason...easier, h/w maint,, less paperwork,....etc.) fine, but a > ... Thanks, Roger, for indicating flame, and i don't really want to get a flame war going here. Stefan has a perfectly good response already, but i felt this needed a little more discussion. We've had lots of experience in helping our customers integrate other vendors drives into the Delta series systems. We've done it A LOT! Almost without exception we've discovered problems with the vendors' drives and, less often, problems with our firmware or software operating with these new drives. Ron's point, that low volume customers tend to get less attention from the manufacturer, is the main problem. Our factory has generally had enough clout to get problems fixed when they're doing the integration, but the drive manufacturer may take several months, if ever, to get the fixes put into the drives they have on the market. And drives may be in distributor inventory, which means that has to be used up before anything new can make it to the customer. Lots of problems. When you buy from us, you've got our full backing on the drive and its support, and that IS worth *something*. If you can't afford to pay whatever a system manufacturer has decided that's worth, then you MAY discover you actually have to pay far more to overcome the problems that crop up. On the other hand, you MAY discover that the drive comes from the drive vendor identical to what you get from the system vendor and it just plugs right in. To sum it up, we're willing to work with people who simply will not buy drives from us, but bad experience has taught us that we can't recommend strongly enough to buy your drives from the same vendor from whom you buy your system. (I've had experience with many vendors in past lives...the story is pretty much the same, no matter which three intials you choose to use!)
krukar@pprg.unm.edu (Richard Krukar [CHTM]) (07/27/90)
If I worked for Motorola, I would also suggest that you just buy the Moto drives. Not because I want to make some sales, but because my advice should be guaranteed correct. But I do not work for Motorola, so I can freely give advice of questionable reliability. I have bought third party drives and plopped them into my machine. The easiest way to do this is look at the list of supported drives. Then shop around for the best price. When you get the thing, just give it a SCSI id, run iot;t from the monitor, then boot your box. Once it is up, format it, create the filesystem(s), edit /etc/fstab and you are in business. I have also wasted a lot of time with non-standard SCSI devices. There are a lot of bad implementations out there and the vendors are less than sympathetic. Anyway, have fun. Richard Krukar (krukar@pprg.unm.edu)
stevea@mcdclv.UUCP (Steve Alexander) (07/31/90)
In article <28215@pprg.unm.edu> krukar@pprg.unm.edu (Richard Krukar [CHTM]) writes: > > If I worked for Motorola, I would also suggest that you just buy >the Moto drives. Not because I want to make some sales, but because my advice >should be guaranteed correct. But I do not work for Motorola, so I can freely >give advice of questionable reliability. > > I have bought third party drives and plopped them into my machine. >The easiest way to do this is look at the list of supported drives. Then shop >around for the best price. [...] Well I work for Motorola and issues of guaranteed correctness aside, and I would still suggest that you avoid integrating your own SCSI drives unless you are capable of doing your own support. I have seen cases where drives which are on the supported drive list, are delivered with different firmware or diskware revisions than the ones we sell. These have resulted in disks which will format correctly, but require about 20 minutes to boot (because they are furiously accessing diskware), disks that simply will not format correctly (some geomety parameters not writable) and in one case a disk that held the SCSI bus busy for the entire format time (causing Unix to panic due to excessive timeouts on the SCSI bus from other devices). Of course the drive manufacturer's first response is that the Motorola hardware doesn't work because their drive is known to work on an XYZ system (which happens to not exercise the problem). At this point you find a SCSI bus analyser. Fourty engineering man hours later you isolate the problem, document it to the drive manufacturer's satisfaction, and receive a promise that they will fix this in their next firmware revision in six months or so. Sound unrealistic ? This is exactly what happened to one of my customers; a division of one of the big three auto manufacturers no less. If you gotta do-it-yourself, at least try to get a promise that the drive revision is the same as the supported model ... you're still on your own though. -- Steve Alexander | a twelve ton cast iron soda cracker, Motorola Cleveland | the stress on an aluminum plastic injection mold, | silly snowflakes dancing wildly for no one, | scotch tape, sticky on NO sides. [sja]