sid@linus.UUCP (Sid Stuart) (08/20/87)
We have been testing a Ciprico Rimfire 3200 disk controller board, (Firmware Rev. 18, Engineering Rev. 44, Unix driver Rev. 1.8-June 30, 1987), in a Sun 3/160 for the last two weeks. So far the prognosis is fair. The system has not crashed once because of the board or the driver. We have only tested it with one disk on the controller so far, but will have two disks on it next week. The only possible problems we have seen are: 1) If the disk is online when the power on the Sun is cycled, it sometimes drops ready or the fault light comes on. We don't know if this is due to the disk or the controller. Hopfully the second disk will help us track it down. 2) Because of its 512K cache the controller works very well when reading a singe file, I have seen the disk responses reach 100/sec on a Fujitsu 2361. Under a heavy load though, the number of hits per second drops down below 20. We think this is because the driver does not optimize seeks. The controller board is supposed to do this, but the Ciprico software does not turn this feature on. We have not contacted Ciprico yet to talk to them about this, but will soon. What we are looking for is additional experiences with the board and driver, good or bad. Also if there are any local mods for the driver, we would like to see them. We are particularly interested in any seek optimization modifications. If the experiences have been bad we would like to know the Revision number/Last mod date on the software driver. It is our hope that Ciprico has ironed out most of the bugs. Anything but the 450/451, sid
ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (08/20/87)
I have a Ciprico Rf2200 rim fire controller running my nine track on a Multibus II system. It works well, I haven't had any problems and CIPRICO has been very cooperative with us (they had sent us an early version of the UNIX driver). -Ron