bergman@jplopto.jpl.nasa.gov (Larry Bergman) (04/05/89)
Has anyone tried dropping in the new Wren V 702MB hard drives or Wren VI 766MB hard drives with embedded ESDI/SCSI controllers into your Sun 3 yet? If so, what SCSI controller board and OS were you using and did you experience any unusual installation problems? Thanks in advance, Larry Bergman INTERNET: bergman@jplopto.Jpl.Nasa.Gov M/S 300-329 UUNET: jplpub1!jplopto!bergman Jet Propulsion Laboratory TEL: (818) 354-4689 Pasadena, CA 91109 FAX: (818) 354-3437
brent@uunet.uu.net (Brent Chapman) (04/24/89)
# Has anyone tried dropping in the new Wren V 702MB hard drives or Wren VI # 766MB hard drives with embedded ESDI/SCSI controllers into your Sun 3 yet? # If so, what SCSI controller board and OS were you using and did you # experience any unusual installation problems? I've got a pair of the Wren V 702 MB disks, one on each of two 3/60s running 3.5. They work great! Formatting and partitioning them can be slightly tricky because the disk has a variable number of sectors per track (more sectors on outer tracks), and the UNIX filesystem assumes a fixed number of sectors per track. You just lie to UNIX about how many sectors per track there are, giving it some "average" number that gets you all the sectors, though they won't be on the tracks UNIX thinks they are. This doesn't really matter, though, because it turns out that, with SCSI disks, the track/sector information is _only_ used within the kernel to try to optimize head seeks; all communications to the SCSI controller are of the form "give me sector # so_and_so", where so_and_so is an absolute sector number (it's up to the controller to figure out what head/track/relative_sector this translates to). Thus, you can get to all the sectors, but the optimization attempts in the kernel definitely _aren't_ optimizing; I doubt if they're hurting things too much, though. I used "1547 cylinders 15 heads 50 sectors/track" to format mine. -Brent -- Brent Chapman Capital Market Technology, Inc. Computer Operations Manager 1995 University Ave., Suite 390 brent@capmkt.com Berkeley, CA 94704 {cogsci,lll-tis,uunet}!capmkt!brent Phone: 415/540-6400