butzer@CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Dan Butzer) (08/08/90)
Thanks to everyone who replied to my request for info regarding 3rd party disks on Apollo DN3500 (ESDI). In su,,ary, I asked if it was possible to connect 3rd party ESDI disks (ie HP97548E), and whether Apollo "locked out" 3rd party disks, and if anyone had worked out a way to use 3rd party ESDIs with Apollo DN3500's. Based on the responses it is not possible, and it is not due to "nasty marketing" For details, read on... --- From: Timothy VanFosson <timv@cadfx.ccad.uiowa.edu> My understanding is that they only recognize certain types of disk, e.g., Maxtor XT8760E, because the controller only supports disks of certain sizes and formats. Any third-party disk that looks like one of these supported types will work. We are, in fact, using a National Peripherals-packaged XT8760E on our DN3500 with no problems. You may also want to check your DN3500 and see if it has a SCSI port. If so, you should be able to add SCSI disks to your DN3500 without problems. I have not tried this but our FE says it should work. --- From: krowitz@richter.mit.edu (David Krowitz) The DN3000, DN3500, DN4000, and DN4500 only use EDSI disks. Although the Western Digitial WD7000 controller found in many of the more recently shipped DN3500's and DN4500's has a SCSI port on it, the disk controller portion of the board is an EDSI controller. The Apollo OS only supports tape drives attached to the SCSI port of the controller. --- From: krowitz@richter.mit.edu (David Krowitz) Ah, well, that kind of negates my previous message ... Apollo's ESDI support is written for a particular set of drives which they support. Try running the program /systest/ssr_util/jumper to see which drives they support and how the drives are jumpered (both on the controller board and on the disk drive logic board). In addition, the CONFIG program (run from the mnemonic debugger with the EX CONFIG command) lists the set of drives which Apollo supports, but also (depending of the version) lists "other". I haven't tried "other" before ... see what you can get with it. --- From: collins@nvpna1.prl.philips.nl (Donal O Coileain) In comp.sys.apollo you write: >I have heard from usually reliable sources that Apollo >likes to read MFG codes from disks, boards, etc, and lock out >anything that they didn't sell. HP-Apollo's DN2500 and HP9400 systems have SCSI busses so you are free to attact multiple SCSI drives. Outside of these two systems the choice is a bit limited. --- From: frank@caen.engin.umich.edu (Randy Frank) this isn't Apollo marketing being nasty: the problem is purely technical. Apollo uses a non-standard sector size (1280 bytes, I recall), which is not a power of two. Many ESDI disk drives don't support such non-standard sector sizes. As an amusing side note, one of the disks that won't work on the Apollos are the HP OEM ESDI drives. (Which is too bad, since they are supposed to be one of the most reliable ESDI drives on the market.) Maybe HP has a motivation to fix this now! --- That's all folks. Thanks Once Again. --Dan