Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!chx400!ethz!visinfo From: visinfo@ethz.UUCP (VISINFO c/o Sascha Schnapka) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Subject: Re: Who's got the biggest SCSI drive actually functioning Keywords: Hard Drive SCSI Message-ID: <5084@ethz.UUCP> Date: 13 Jul 90 14:02:27 GMT References: <1990Jul4.035345.18031@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Reply-To: visinfo@bernina.ethz.ch.UUCP (VISINFO c/o Peter Simeon) Organization: ETH Zuerich, Switzerland Lines: 79 In article <1990Jul4.035345.18031@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: >Some folks I know have a 600Mbyte SCSI drive available at a price >reasonable to me, but don't know the Amiga from a pile of sand. >So here are a few of things I'd like to learn from the available >wisdom of the net: > >1) What's the biggest SCSI drive anyone has up and running, say > for at least a couple of months to make sure it's stable? 3 other people and me have CDC WREN VI 94191-766 hard drives running on the Amiga for a few month now. The CDC Wren Drives are really great. They work on all controllers we have tested: Amiga 3000, A2091, HardFrame, GVP. It also works on the A2090, but due to a bug in the hddisk.device you cannot access the hard drive above 256MB. The WREN VI is also extremely fast. We have a transfer rate of 1.3-1.4 Meg/s on most fast controllers. You have a formatted capacity of 633 MB on a 94191-766. Today we hooked up a Maxtor Tahiti Optical drive to the Amiga 3000. It worked without any troubles. We could format the Disk and got 442 MB formatted capacity. We could read and write files to it like a normal hard drive. For a TMO drive it is quite fast: 200KB/s write and 500KB/s read. The Tahiti Cartridges you can turn around and so you have 884 MB. We only had Cartridges with 512 Byte sectors. We don't know if the 1024 Byte sector Cartridges also would work. This would give you an extra space of 40 MB/side, but you loose compatibility with other controllers (most PC and MAC drivers cannot use 1024 Byte sectors). There are two minor problems with the Amiga 3000 hard drive software and the Tahiti: 1. The HD-ToolBox reports that it is a non-direct access device and so it refused to Inquire the drive and setup the correct values for the Rigid Disk Block. I suppose that this has something to do with the Drive Type that is stored in the Mode Sense Pages. My SCSIinfo reported that the Drive Type is 60 and that it has removable media. (A SyQuest SQ555 reports a Drive Type of 30). We entered the values reported by SCSIinfo and after that we could write the Rigid Disk Blocks and use the drive. 2. The scsi.device could not handle the diskchange correctly. It tried to do it, but it didn't work. We had to enter diskchange manually. This could have something to with 1. Note that the removable media support worked great on a SyQuest SQ555 (This test was done under Beta 5 (Kickstart 36.65)). >2) Does the software Commodore supplies with 1.3 suffice to > low/high level format such a beast, or does the vendor have > to know enough about the Amiga to supply some software to > do the job -- i.e., can I just buy hardware? With most SCSI Controller you don't need additional drivers. >3) Are there limitations in AmigaDOS or in the SCSI standard that > force large disks to be partitioned in multiple pieces, or can > I just make it one huge tree? The current limitations I think are about 2GB. Make sure you use the newest FastFileSystem (Version 36.03). The older versions had some bugs which resulted in a partition limitation of about 300MB. >4) If I can make it one big partition, are there good reasons for > making it several smaller ones instead? The main reason is that you can orginize you data better with more than one partition. Also the access time within a partition is faster if it is smaller. Don't make too many partitions either because each partition takes about 50K of RAM. With 10 automount partitions the A3000 refuses to load the Kickstart into memory and you can not boot anymore and have to use the internal Kickstart, which is quite buggy. > >-- >(Who really shouldn't be thinking about spending more money, but...) /* -------------------------- SG (Simeon Graphics) ---------------------- */ /* Peter Simeon, UUCP: | // // */ /* visinfo@bernina.ethz.ch | // Long live the AMIGA! // */ /* BIX: hardwiz | \X/ \X/ */ /* ---------------------------------------------------------------------- */