Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!watserv1!watdragon!rose!ccplumb
From: ccplumb@rose.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Hard Drive/Controller
Message-ID: <18766@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 28 Nov 89 23:58:02 GMT
References: <1989Nov21.224423.3829@athena.mit.edu> <18611@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <24531@cup.portal.com>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: ccplumb@rose.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Distribution: na
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 34

A few more notes:
The A590 has a DIP switch to select slow booting, to let disk drives spin up.
Presumably, the 2091 will have this as well.

In article <24531@cup.portal.com> FelineGrace@cup.portal.com (Dana B Bourgeois) writes:
>I know it probably isn't a problem now but when will support for more
>than 8 SCSI devices appear?  And do the current products support the
>attach/detach elements that are built into the standard?  SCSI has 
>been around for at least 5 years now and it seems there is only support 
>for a subset of the standard.  What's the reason?

There is support for more than 8 SCSI devices, in some sense... each bus
interface can have 8 "logical units" attached to it.  The A590, at least,
supports multiple LUNs.  While not as bad as RS232, there are an infinite
number of bad SCSI implementations, and some drives answer multiple LUNs
(even though they're the same thing), so the feature can be disabled by a
dip switch.

As for why people keep supporting substandard SCSI implementations...
well, becasue they work.   People can plug them in and still have it
work, so they don't complain.  And it saved the manufacturer a few months
of ROM debugging (and possibly bigger ROMs), so he's happy.

>And why don't we have SCSI modems?  Don't tell me a 9600 BPS modem
>wouldn't benefit from SCSI.  Better yet, why wouldn't it be a good idea?

I believe they exist: I heard of some extra serial ports for Suns that
hook onto the SCSI bus.  I was talking with onr of the local gurus, and
he was lamenting that we have this nice thin coaxial cable coming from
the terminal concentrator, which turns into hundreds of RS232 lines, and
then all get plugged into cards.  The SCSI bus seems like a good thing to
use for hooking up 50 terminals or so.
-- 
	-Colin