serge@rga.com.UUCP (Serge Sretschinsky) (06/01/90)
I have been recently asked: "Gee, these SCSI drives for our Macs seem to be a lot cheaper that those we could get for the Suns. Couldn't we just buy the cheaper Mac versions and plug 'em into the Sun SCSI adapter?" My guess as to the correct answer was "maybe". There are numerous data exchange "standards" in this world which seem to require quite a bit of twiddling before they'll work. My favorite is RS-232, which at least has the saving grace of not killing the hardware if the wrong pins make contact. One rumor I remember hearing was that one of Sun's SCSI pins may have a voltage on it that will damage a non-Sun peripheral. Is this true, or did I read wrong? The other issue is software. While SCSI drives seem fairly standard as well, can I really expect an Apple SCSI drive to work with a SUN SCSI driver? Seems like this should work. I guess more elaborate devices like SCSI/Ethernet adapters and scanners require more elaborate device drivers in addition to the applications software, or am I wrong here too? Sorry if these are stupid questions, but comming from the SUN world I am more familiar with SMD which, until recently, was the way to go for performance. the supreme COMPUTER janitor, serge