bryan@sierra.STANFORD.EDU (bryan) (12/21/90)
We have some big, old, heavy Fujitsu Eagles (300 MB, wow!) that we'd like to add to our Symmetry. The Symmetry already has 2 Eagles on it. Has anybody ever done this without Sequent's help? How hard is it? We've added Eagles to our Sun-3 file servers before, and it was fairly easy. I'm hoping the same is true for the Symmetry. doug
curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch) (12/21/90)
In article <48@sierra.STANFORD.EDU> bryan@sierra.STANFORD.EDU (bryan) writes: >We have some big, old, heavy Fujitsu Eagles (300 MB, wow!) that we'd >like to add to our Symmetry. The Symmetry already has 2 Eagles on it. >Has anybody ever done this without Sequent's help? How hard is it? I've done it. It's not too hard. We chose the Sequent because it supports Eagle drives. We have 12 of those old drives on our 5 Vax systems. We plan on moving them all to the Sequent. Despite their size, they're the best drives we've got. In the 5 years I've been here, not one of them has ever had a hardware problem. Everything else here has been replace or rebuilt a few times. We have an S27. Two of the Eagles were connected by Sequent when the system was installed this summer. I connected two more later without Sequent's help. The drives are Fujitsu M2351A. On the Sequent, they are 396 Megabytes formated (not just 300). To install them, I had to change some jumpers on one of the cards inside the drive, set the drive number switches (near where the A and B cables attach to the drive), and cable it to the Sequent dual-channel controller. Once connected, I ran the Sequent format program, and then booted Dynix. I got the jumper information from a Sequent document on installing their 396-Mbyte drive. (Which is the eagle). In case you didn't know, Sequent used to sell the Eagles, which is why this all works. The Sequent tech left me the 4 pages or so from the manual with the important information. I could send this to you if you can't get it from Sequent. The biggest problem I had was a lack of a jumper. The new jumper configuration required one more jumper. I had to steal it from an Eagle dual-channel board that we didn't need. On the Vax, the SMD drives use a daisy-chained A cable (the wider one). On the Sequent, both the A and B cable must run to the controller for each drive. This means that you also need a terminator card for each drive. I think that there are some limitations on connecting different types of drives to the same controller on the Sequent. If you plan to do this, you should check with Sequent first. I think that all drives on one "side" of a DCC must be the same type. Some older Sequents seem to use a Multibus disk controller. Be ware that the jumper settings on the drive are different for this type of controller. Good luck, Curt Welch curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil Code 3531 David Taylor Research Center (A Navy Lab) Bethesda, MD (301) 227-1428
pen@lysator.liu.se (Peter Eriksson) (12/22/90)
curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch) writes: >Some older Sequents seem to use a Multibus disk controller. Be ware that >the jumper settings on the drive are different for this type of controller. We are using one of those (it is really a Xylogics 450 controller). And although the documentation doesn't say anything about it, one can connect almost any SMD compatible disk to it (not just Fujitsu Eagles). One has to reconfigure the device driver and rebuild the formatting program (xpformat). If you want to know more about it, just email me. (We are running a Fujitsu M2322 on it right now.) /Peter -- Peter Eriksson pen@lysator.liu.se Lysator Computer Club ...!uunet!lysator.liu.se!pen University of Linkoping, Sweden "Seize the day!"