rhc@uunet.uu.net (Glenn Trigg) (11/23/88)
Kevin J. Maciunas <munnari!cs.flinders.oz.au!kevin@uunet.uu.net>: > Is there anyone out there with a CDC WREN-V (574MB formatted) SCSI drive > on a Sun? [3/60 especially..]. We have experience with WREN-[III/IV] but > someone said there were problems with the V.... We (Meteorology department of Melb. Uni) have just put a Wren V onto our Sun 3/60 just last week. So far we have had no trouble with it. Our 3/60 was originally run as a diskless sun from out 3/110 (with Micropolis and Wren IV disks), so to install the Wren V we took off the Wren IV (from the 3/110) and plugged the Wren V in its place to format and label it. Then we plugged the Wren IV back into the 3/110 and the Wren V into the 3/60 and away they both went. One other point that may be of interest is the we also have an exabyte tape drive on the 3/60 and the Wren V is on the other side of that with respect to the 3/60. Let me know if you want any more info or if any of this is not clear. Glenn Trigg rhc@munnari
mike@poa.nrel.colostate.edu (Mike Vevea) (11/23/88)
We've got several, two on 3/50's and one on a 4/110. We've never had problems with them under OS4.0, but they didn't seem to work well under a couple of situations: 1) I didn't try too hard, but they did not run reliably under OS3.4; I could sometimes read them, but if I left them mounted for more than a few seconds, or attempted any real I/O from them, the system crashed. 2) they don't seem to work well with other disks on the same SCSI controller (the CPU end that is). We had problems running them as a second drive when the first drive was either another Wren V or a Sun shoebox 140M drive. (The symptoms were: we could usually write with no problems, but we frequently got bad reads.) Still, they are a good cheap disk, and I've been quite happy with them as long as I didn't try using them with another drive on the same system. I have purchased more, and suggested that others do the same, given the limitations I've mentioned. (Also, I haven't really pursued the problems. There may be a simple way around them, but I only needed multiple disks until I could get a boot image on the WrenV, so I just worked around the problem rather than trying for a real solution.) mikeV (mike@poa.nrel.colostate.edu or vevea@csugold.bitnet)
roberts%studguppy@lanl.gov (Doug Roberts) (11/23/88)
We've had a Wren-V-702 on a 3/260 running OS3.5, and on a 4/110 running OS4.0. The disk, which was 702 MB unformatted, formats down to 602 MB. After you put a file system on it you have ~575 MB left. There _is_ a problem with format under 4.0 which causes it to break while formatting the Wren-V. OS 3.5, however, had no problems formatting the disk. I hear that there's a new format under OS4.0.1, but I haven't gotten it for the 4/110 yet. Format under 4.0 is known to be buggy. So far, it looks like a great little (big) disk... --Doug Douglas Roberts Los Alamos National Laboratory (505)667-4569 dzzr@lanl.gov