robinb@bhpmrl.oz.au (Robin Brown) (02/01/91)
Does anybody have any experience using optical r/w drives on Apollo's?
I'm told that we cannot connect them to our DN3500/4500/10k's as while
these machines do have SCSI interfaces there is no software support
for SCSI based optical drives. This means that we have to buy a DN2500
or one of the new 400 series machines. If anyone has any info on third
party drives I'd be very interested as the devices HP are offering are
roughly 300Mb per side and I've heard that Maxdor make drives with 1/2
a Gbyte per side. I've also heard that there are problems with the Sony
drives, if anybody could confirm (or refute) this I'd appreciate it.
Thanks in advance
Robin
/\/\ Robin Brown (Mr)
/ / /\ Support Engineer (Unix systems & CAD/CAM/CAE)
/ / / \ Computer Systems Group
/ / / /\ \ BHP Research - Melbourne Laboratories
\ \/ / / / 245 Wellington Rd Mulgrave Vic 3170 AUSTRALIA
\ / / / Phone : +61-3-560-7066, Fax : +61-3-561-6709
\/\/\/ ACSnet : robinb@bhpmrl.oz.aukrowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) (02/04/91)
We have several of the Sony SMO-S501 optical drives running on DN2500's. They have about 315 MB per side using 1024-byte/sector platters or about 285 MB per side using the 512-byte/sector platters. The drives have a slow, seek time of roughly 90 msec. This seems to cause intermittant "object not found" errors, especially when the mount point is not located on the local disk of the DN2500 *and* the remote machine where the mount point is located is a slower machine (like a DSP90). We are running two DN2500's diskless with the Sony drives. They are ok as long as the mount points are on their DN3500 partner. They get the intermittant drop out problem when mounted on slower machines, especially on SR9.7 machines. We have one DN2500 with a local disk (a Quantum 170S which we installed ourselves) and the Sony drive which seems to run just fine. -- David Krowitz krowitz@richter.mit.edu (18.83.0.109) krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet (in order of decreasing preference)
finley@snuffy.lerc.nasa.gov (Brian Finley) (02/12/91)
>Does anybody have any experience using optical r/w drives on Apollo's? >I'm told that we cannot connect them to our DN3500/4500/10k's as while >these machines do have SCSI interfaces there is no software support >for SCSI based optical drives. You can connect SCSI optical drives to a DN4500. We have 3 of them connected to ours. It is correct that there is no software written for them or supported by Apollo. You must purchase the GPIO product from Apollo. This software contains all the low level SCSI calls needed to develop a SCSI driver. We have had to write all of our own software using GPIO. The drives we are using are OPTOTECH 5984 WORM drives which are 200Mb per side. I would not recommend them for several reasons, one is that OPTOTECH is no longer in business and the company which took over the product MT. OPTECH doesn't seem to offer much support and may not be long for this world. If you find an optical drive manufacturer who has software for the Apollo I would be interested in hearing about it. supports his not recommend them -- ---------------- Brian Finley / To err is human-and to blame it on a computer is even more so Internet: finley@snuffy.lerc.nasa.gov Phone: +1 216-891-2975