[comp.sys.sgi] Wren IV, and general hard drive setup

rodney@dgp.toronto.edu (Rodney Hoinkes) (08/02/90)

	We are looking into purchasing a few of these drives (Wren IV)
	for our IRIS's but we are uncertain as to the requirements of
	hooking them up to primarily Personal Iris's, but potentially
	a 70GT as well.

	On the PI, is it simply a matter of hooking it into the SCSI
	port, plugging it into the wall (it's own power supply), and
	sicking fx onto it?  Does anyone know if device drivers exist
	for this drive (320Meg) ?

	On the GT, we have little idea of what is required for hookup.
	We currently have a 380Meg ESDI drive and controller, but hinv
	also says we have a WD33C93 SCSI controller.

	Any technical help would be appreciated.

---
	Rodney Hoinkes
	Centre for Landscape Research
	University of Toronto

	rodney@dgp.toronto.edu

olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) (08/03/90)

In <1990Aug1.133136.4621@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> rodney@dgp.toronto.edu (Rodney Hoinkes) writes:


| 	We are looking into purchasing a few of these drives (Wren IV)
| 	for our IRIS's but we are uncertain as to the requirements of
| 	hooking them up to primarily Personal Iris's, but potentially
| 	a 70GT as well.
| 
| 	On the PI, is it simply a matter of hooking it into the SCSI
| 	port, plugging it into the wall (it's own power supply), and
| 	sicking fx onto it?  Does anyone know if device drivers exist
| 	for this drive (320Meg) ?
| 
| 	On the GT, we have little idea of what is required for hookup.
| 	We currently have a 380Meg ESDI drive and controller, but hinv
| 	also says we have a WD33C93 SCSI controller.
| 
| 	Any technical help would be appreciated.
| 

You are on the right track with fx.  The Wren IV has been shipped on
all of the 4D platforms, and is a fairly reliable drive.  There have
been a few firmware revs on this drive with problems that show up
primarily on the PI (or the IO3 board) due to the higher transfer
rates.

Start up fx as 'fx -x' since you need to be in expert mode.  Since you
have a non-SGI drive anyway, just use the 'auto' choice.  This will set
parameters to default values, format the drive, create a partition
table, and write it out.  You should then be able to make a filesytem
on it with mkfs or 'Add_disk', add it to your fstab, and away you go.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.