pez@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Daniel J Pezely) (09/15/88)
I heard that A/UX was "designed" to be used on a Apple HD or whatever drive is in there (it's a Quantum, isn't it?). By "designed" I mean that disk responce time on other drives will be less than optimal and also that there could be other problems. Could anyone shed some light on this and hopefully say that it is all nonsence? I would like to get a 300+ Meg drive for A/UX instead of a combination of 4 HD80's from Apple. (Sorry Apple.) The drive I'm interested in is a Micah 310. If there is a problem using other drives, does version 1.1 fix it? Thanks, Dan Pezely pez@vax1.acs.udel.edu University of Delaware
phil@Apple.COM (Phil Ronzone) (09/20/88)
In article <1897@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> pez@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Daniel J Pezely) writes: > > > I heard that A/UX was "designed" to be used on a Apple HD or >whatever drive is in there (it's a Quantum, isn't it?). By "designed" >I mean that disk responce time on other drives will be less than optimal and >also that there could be other problems. Could anyone shed some light on >this and hopefully say that it is all nonsence? Yes, it is nonsense. The A/UX SCSI Manager/Driver was explicitly designed to support any "reasonable" SCSI disk drive. The catch is twofold: 1). What is "reasonable"? We were pragmatic, and tried as many of the third party drives as we could get our hands on. This was a pretty informal process. We ended up with Quantum, Seagate, CDC, and Micropolis drives, plus several that used a DPT "SCSI caching" controller. We have gotten reports that Toshiba and Hitachi and other drives work from third parties & contractors. 2). It IS the A/UX Manager/Driver. Since A/UX boots via the Mac OS, if you wish to boot off your non-Apple drive, you must have the drive's vendor provide the Mac OS bootstrap software and (often) the Mac OS disk partitioning software. So even if A/UX handles the drive, at times there is no Mac OS driver software to boot off of it. Apple wants to promote as general a SCSI Manager/Driver as reasonably can be done. We don't sell 160MB, 320MB and so on disk drives (yet :-) ). And those sizes are very popular in the UNIX world. I would ask that any success/horror stories be emailed or AppleLinked to me. If there are enough replies, I can post a summary. But we will also take into account the stories for future improvements etc. on the A/UX SCSI Manager/Driver. SUMMARY: Naw, we didn't do mean things to slow down or sabotage non-Apple disk drives. They supported they same as Apple drives. But do doublecheck your interleave and other such factors if your drive appears slow. +------------------------+-----------------------+----------------------------+ | Philip K. Ronzone | A/UX System Architect | APPLELINK: RONZONE1 | | Apple Computer +-----------------------+----------------------------+ | Mail Stop 27AJ | "Forgive him Caesar, for he is a barbarian, and | | 10500 N. DeAnza Blvd. | thinks the features of his release are the ways | | Cupertino CA 95014 | of nature." | +------------------------+----------------------------------------------------+ |{amdahl,decwrl,sun,voder,nsc,mtxinu,dual,unisoft}!apple!phil | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+