tin@szebra.szebra.uucp (Tin Le) (09/14/90)
Announcing a Seagate ST-02 driver for ISC V/386 v2.0.2. This is a
modification of the ST-01 driver by Tatu Ylonen. It should still
work with the ST-01 controller (I don't have an ST-01 to test),
however it won't work on Microport any longer (use the original
driver for that).
What's an ST-02 (or ST-01)? It's a low cost SCSI host adapter (read
"cheap") by Seagate. The ST-02 also has floppy controller on board
(for both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies, 360K to 1.44MB). It has a ROM
BIOS (for DOS to boot up on).
Advantages: cheap (I bought mine for about $50 including tax), will
work with other hard disk ctrlrs in your system (I used it and a
WD 1003 in my system).
Disadvantages: 8bit bus (to the PC), no DMA (interrupt driven), no
software (till now). You can't boot up on it (not for UNIX, but DOS
is OK).
Seagate really intended it for the MSDOS world. You're supposed to
buy their specially marked HD that is already formatted and has their
softwares on it for further partitioning or reformatting.
Now that you understand a little about this card, here's the deal.
The ST-01 driver by Tatu was for Microport V3.00e, so I made some
changes to get it working with ISC v2.0.2. I believe I've also made
it slightly faster. It's been running for a while here on szebra,
controlling a CDC Wren III, which is my news partition. I think
it is stable enough to release.
So for about $50, plus about 1/2 an hour to install the driver, you
can have a SCSI subsystem. Compare that to other SCSI controllers
out there for PC, I couldn't find anything less than $250. Best of
all, the software is free. I've sent mail to Tatu to let him know
of my changes and got his ok to release it.
I am polishing the documentation right now, so it will be out soon.
-- Tin Le
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