green@halifax.ee.umd.edu (Mike Green) (12/21/88)
The College of Engineering at the University of Maryland has been fitting Sun 3 workstations with Everex 91D local disks. The Everex product is a 90MB Wren III with a SCSI interface which is sold for the MAC, they plug into the Suns quite nicely and a demo unit ran fine for some months. We are now running into big, big problems with them, basically they go into meltdown at random intervals. The power supplies fry, several components will melt and we return them to be repaired under a one year warranty. We have around 30% failure rate. Does anyone have any experience with this ? We have checked pin-outs and the Everex has the optional Vcc (5 volts) on pin 26 which appears to be a n/c on the Sun. All of our Suns have the later board which has pin 25 as ground. Is there some hardware incompatibility with the Sun or are the power supplies just not up to scratch ? Any help much appreciated etc. ARPA: green@hellcat.eng.umd.edu UUCP: allegra!mimsy!eneevax!hellcat!green VOICE: (301) 454 2922 at work, or (301) 253 2807 at home.
cander@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Charles Anderson) (01/05/89)
green@halifax.ee.umd.edu (Mike Green): > Does anyone have any experience with this ? > We have checked pin-outs and the Everex has the optional Vcc (5 volts) on > pin 26 which appears to be a n/c on the Sun. All of our Suns have the > later board which has pin 25 as ground. Is there some hardware > incompatibility with the Sun or are the power supplies just not up to > scratch ? Any help much appreciated etc. I never tried using an Everex, but I have interfaced other third party drives to Sun 3's. The product I was interfacing ran fine on a 3/50, but produced a burning power supply smell on a 3/60. I talked to some people at Sun (including the manager of the SCSI products group) and they were totally unware of any differences. I found out by poking around with a DVM, that pin 26 is not connected on 3/50's but is tied to ground on 3/60's. The box I was using was putting Vcc on pin 26. What kind of Suns are you connecting the Everex to? If you are using 3/60's, I really expect an immediate failure (i.e., burnt power supply). The way I got around it was to remove pin 26 (with pliers and brute force) from the cable going into the Sun. The other possibility is that the Everex is junk. I've heard that said about some of their products, but I don't have experience with them to comment on that directly. -- Charles. {sun, amdahl, ucbvax, pyramid, uunet}!unisoft!cander