eam@soleil.UUCP (Ed A. Mills) (02/02/90)
About 2 weeks ago I posted a question in this conference asking the
readers if anyone had or had heard of an optical drive that actually
worked on VS-3100. I wanted to follow that poll up with the results
for any interested readers...
Affirmative responses: 0
Negative Responses : 0
Other Responses : 0
Conclusion: There are no R/W Optical drives available that work on VS-
3100, so don' t believe what you read in the trades!
Ed Mills
Harris Semircb@ccpv1.ncsu.edu (Randy Buckland) (02/02/90)
I must have missed your first posting. I've been getting demo units and here are my results. HP (107ms seek time) The drive showed up, but the only available platter was 1024-byte per sector and the ultrix driver didn't like that. I looked like it might work with the 512 byte platter but HP didn't have one yet. (The drive would support it, they just weren't in production since their workstation used the 1024 one) RICOH (Trimarchi) (65ms seek time) The drive failed completely when addressed as scsi address 0. When addressed as scsi address 4, it was found on boot but would not function. However, after issuing the command: dd if=/dev/rz4c of=/dev/null count=10 the drive would mount and function perfectly. After many long calls to Trimarchi, they finally told me that the drive would not work on a vs3100 and I told them how I had made it work. I saw their install manuals recently and the above hack is now being recommended to be put in you /etc/rc.local file as standard procedure. Don't ask me why it worked, I don't know. Overall recommendation is negative. I don't like the above hack to make it work. MAXTOR (U.S designs) (35ms seek time!!!!!) This drive seemed to work great. I had an occasional problem with losing data, but I believe that the platter being used was bad since it showed about 300 bad blocks and the bad block table had garbage entries in it. I think when I got a bad block remap attempt the bad data in the bad block list confused the drive controller. My salesman is currently trying to get me a new drive/palatter (more later). One oddity about the model I had was that it did not report it's device type as 0 (direct access device - i.e. disk) but as 7 (optical disk). The ultrix driver did not know what to make of this and promptly ignored it. I read the driver code and found I could patch it to make it think type 7 was really type 0 and it started working. Now the good news. The new model of the drive that maxtor is making and my salesman has been trying to get for over a month now is supposed to have a switch that determines if the drives reports device type 0 or 7 which would remove the need for the driver patch I used. Also maxtor is reportedly working on a model with a head on each side of the platter that should be out soon. The last good thing about the maxtor drive is that it will either take the standard CAV format disk (sony, ricoh, hp format) for 300MB per side or a zoned format disk (like mac floppies) that gives 500MB per side and up to twice the transfer rate! I'll report my findings on the new model if I ever get it in. Randy Buckland rcb@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu