[comp.periphs] WD / IBM 3.5" 300+MB disk drive

tim@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Timothy L. Kay) (09/02/89)

Well, Western Digital is about to start shipping IBM-manufactured 3.5"
disk drives with a capacity of more than 300 MB.  This sounds like a
nice disk drive.

My question is, "Can I use my regular SCSI interface to talk to this
drive, given that the drive is SCSI II?"

Second SCSI question:  These days, just about all SCSI devices seem to
have built in SCSI controllers.  This means that I can only put 7 or 8
devices on my SCSI bus.  Are there any devices out there that can make
SCSI devices with built-in controllers look like slave devices?  In
other words, I'd like to put several SCSI hard disks, each with their
own controller, onto this device, and then hook this device onto my
bus as lun1.

Would the other possibility be to get a SCSI controller that talks to
ESDI drives?  Who makes one of these?

Tim

tneale@aeras.UUCP (Tom Neale) (09/09/89)

In article <11792@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> tim@cit-vax.UUCP (Timothy L. Kay) writes:
>
>Well, Western Digital is about to start shipping IBM-manufactured 3.5"
>disk drives with a capacity of more than 300 MB.  This sounds like a
>nice disk drive.
>My question is, "Can I use my regular SCSI interface to talk to this
>drive, given that the drive is SCSI II?"

Yes.  Their support of SCSI II is limited to some of the commands and
features of that spec, not the extended addressing or speed.  There 
do appear to be a couple of quirks in the drive such as mode select pages
being a bit different than other manufacturers.

Can't help you with the other query, though.
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