mt@cleo.cs.wisc.EDU (Manolis Tsangaris) (02/21/90)
In article <11041@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>, cspencer@spdcc.COM (Cliff Spencer) writes: > ...... > I am familiar with Adaptec's ACB 4000 from Suns. This board lets > you hook PC disks up to a SCSI interface. I have a sheet from a > surplus store advertising the ACB 4010 as a similar board for the > Mac. Does anyoe have any experience with it? Yes I do. I have a system with a 30Mbyte Miniscribe and an Adaptec 4010 ST506<->SCSI controller. The disk was formatted using a public domain program called SF&I (available from sumex.stanford.edu). The driver implements a good subset of the SCSI commands, and it works satisfactory. In terms of transfer speed, SCSI evaluator gives a very low figure (something like 6-10Kbytes/sec!), even though : * the controller does track buffering * I use the highest possible clock for the transfers, and * the interleave factor is 1:1. Maybe the poor old 8085 of the controller is not fast enough, or most likely the driver does not do its job efficiently. Blind SCSI tests (that I thing bypass the driver) do not work correctly on the MAC (MAC II, System V.6.0.4). A major problem of the driver/formatter, is that it does not support partitioning, and the use of a second drive (The 4010 supports two ST 506 drives that show up as Logical UNits 0 and 1). Additionally it does not include any sources. The MAC system software does not seem to have a notion of LUN's, so you must cheat it by presenting the two disks as (at least) two partitions. A public domain driver from Leo Drizis (March 1989) could be a good start for an effort like this. Now, why ACB 4000(A) would not work on a Macintosh? --mt
mas@bridge2.ESD.3Com.COM (Mike Smith) (02/27/90)
In article <11041@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> cspencer@ursa-major.spdcc.COM (Cliff Spencer) writes: >I am familiar with Adaptec's ACB 4000 from Suns. This board lets >you hook PC disks up to a SCSI interface. I have a sheet from a >surplus store advertising the ACB 4010 as a similar board for the >Mac. Does anyoe have any experience with it? 3Com uses the Adaptec 4520A to hook CDC's ESDI drives to their file server, the 3C500. I have hooked one up to my MAC II (it doesn't fit inside the MacBox, so it looks funky). Trouble is, I haven't found a SCSI formatter and installer that I can configure the disk table. I do have utilities to check out the drive, and it is working. I've even managed to format it as a Rodine (but corrupted the partition tables). 3Com used a similar setup for its older servers and MFM drives. I don't know what controller they used, however. If anyone knows a good was to format odd MacDrives, I'd appreciate hearing from them. Michael Smith