Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bellcore!att!pacbell.com!ames!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!letni!ataritx!atari!apratt
From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Atari SH204 hostadapter with 'genuine' SCSI drives
Message-ID: <2773@atari.UUCP>
Date: 10 Dec 90 22:44:12 GMT
References: <1990Dec10.110739@kboeng.enet.dec.com>
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 26

heiden@kboeng.enet.dec.com (Matthias Heiden) writes:

[Edited]
>I would like to upgrade my original SH204 with another drive.
>As far as I understand the hostadapter inside the SH204 understands SCSI.
>Does anybody has experience with this solution ? What sort of problems could I
>run into ?

This works for some SH204's.  However, the power supply in the SH204 is
not beefy enough for some drives.  The only way to tell is to see if it
dies. Therefore this is not recommended practice.  In addition, the
host adapter might have the "old" PAL, not the "new" one, which won't
return some errors from the SCSI controller.  This bit me recently: the
"old" PAL didn't return "write protected" from my Syquest drive, and
boy was I confused!  The writes seemed to work, but the cached
directory etc. didn't match what was actually on the disk.

The "old" PAL has the number 60AC on it.  If the little board in your
SH204 has a chip with that number on it, it won't return some errors
from the drive.  I don't know how to get the "new" PAL - maybe dealers
can order it.  Since the SH204 is not in production any more, this
might be hard.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt