Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcdchg!mcdclv!stevea
From: stevea@mcdclv.UUCP (Steve Alexander)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.m68k
Subject: Re: Re: SCSI Disks on Delta 3000s
Message-ID: <632@mcdclv.UUCP>
Date: 30 Jul 90 22:13:08 GMT
References: <3098@lll-lcc.UUCP> <41579@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com> <28215@pprg.unm.edu>
Reply-To: stevea@mcdclv.UUCP (Steve Alexander)
Organization: Motorola MCD, Cleveland
Lines: 41

In article <28215@pprg.unm.edu> krukar@pprg.unm.edu (Richard Krukar [CHTM]) writes:
>
>	If I worked for Motorola, I would also suggest that you just buy
>the Moto drives.  Not because I want to make some sales, but because my advice
>should be guaranteed correct.  But I do not work for Motorola, so I can freely
>give advice of questionable reliability.
>
>	I have bought third party drives and plopped them into my machine.
>The easiest way to do this is look at the list of supported drives.  Then shop
>around for the best price.  [...]

Well I work for Motorola and issues of guaranteed correctness aside,
and I would still suggest that you avoid integrating your own SCSI
drives unless you are capable of doing your own support.  I have seen
cases where drives which are on the supported drive list, are
delivered with different firmware or diskware revisions than the ones
we sell.  These have resulted in disks which will format correctly,
but require about 20 minutes to boot (because they are furiously
accessing diskware), disks that simply will not format correctly (some
geomety parameters not writable) and in one case a disk that held the
SCSI bus busy for the entire format time (causing Unix to panic due to
excessive timeouts on the SCSI bus from other devices).

Of course the drive manufacturer's first response is that the Motorola
hardware doesn't work because their drive is known to work on an XYZ
system (which happens to not exercise the problem).  At this point you
find a SCSI bus analyser.  Fourty engineering man hours later you
isolate the problem, document it to the drive manufacturer's
satisfaction, and receive a promise that they will fix this in their
next firmware revision in six months or so.  Sound unrealistic ?  This
is exactly what happened to one of my customers; a division of one of
the big three auto manufacturers no less.

If you gotta do-it-yourself, at least try to get a promise that the
drive revision is the same as the supported model ... you're still on
your own though.
-- 
Steve Alexander            | a twelve ton cast iron soda cracker,
Motorola Cleveland         | the stress on an aluminum plastic injection mold,
                           | silly snowflakes dancing wildly for no one,
                           | scotch tape, sticky on NO sides.            [sja]