mccalpin@loligo.cc.fsu.edu (John McCalpin) (05/19/89)
I long ago gave up hope on putting third-party drives on our IRIS 3000's. Now that the new machines are using purportedly standard interfaces, I would like to bring up the issue again. Has anyone successfully installed a third-party SCSI drive in a Personal IRIS? They want $4200 (university price) for a 380MB drive, and I can get 660 MB from Maxtor for under $4000, or 702 MB from CDC for under $3000. Further along the same lines, does anyone know of an expansion cabinet that could be used to hold extra SCSI drives to be daisy-chained with the internal drive? I would much rather have 3x660 MB in an external cabinet for about $13,000 than the 3x380 offered by SGI for $13,000 (univ. price).
blbates@AERO4.LARC.NASA.GOV ("Brent L. Bates TAD/TAB ms294 x42854") (05/19/89)
We are in the process of trying to put a third-party drive on our IRIS 3130. The disk is on order. Hopefully the new drive will work ok. I have gotten mail from someone who said they have done it with a data disk. We are going to try it with the system disk and if that works, get another one for data. -- Brent L. Bates NASA-Langley Research Center M.S. 294 Hampton, Virginia 23665-5225 (804) 864-2854 E-mail: blbates@aero4.larc.nasa.gov or blbates@aero2.larc.nasa.gov
olson@anchor.sgi.com (Dave Olson) (05/19/89)
If a drive manufacturer has followed the SCSI spec, and they haven't handled some of the grey areas in a different way than the vendors we have qualified, then the drive should work without too much of a problem; of course it isn't supported, and if you have problems you are on your own... Some drives that we know have problems are Hitachi 314C SCSI (severe enough to not work), early versions of Toshiba 156 (soft errors and bad data, due to an unspec'ed timing being counted on), and Siemens 22XX and 44XX SCSI drives (minor annoyances and 'excessive' noise). I haven't yet seen the Maxtor, so I can't comment on it. Beware of termination and cable length issues, including stubs, if you go it on your own as far as an expansion cabinet. We follow the SCSI standard as to connectors, pin assignments, etc., so there shouldn't be any problem there. The fx program should be able to handle setup and format on most SCSI drives, given the constraints above. Releases prior to 3.2 may have problems with the sizes of mode select pages, and pages that it expected to see; in 3.2 we use the mode sense on page 3F technique to get the supported pages and their sizes. The CDC/Imprimis drives have definitely been the most reliable, as well as the most Mb/$ of the drives we have looked at qualifying. By the way, be very wary of trying to put external SCSI drives on our older 4D models, since there were some violations of the SCSI standard in regards to cabling; this has been fixed, but older systems need an extensive upgrade to resolve the problem. Dave Olson It's important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. -- Stephen A. Kallis, Jr.