Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!think!ames!amdcad!weitek!pyramid!cbmvax!joe
From: joe@cbmvax.UUCP (Joe O'Hara)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: I'm ordering a 2090A
Message-ID: <4999@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 16 Oct 88 03:42:58 GMT
References: <910@hub.ucsb.edu>
Reply-To: joe@cbmvax.UUCP (Joe O'Hara)
Distribution: na
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 26

In article <910@hub.ucsb.edu> hbo@sbphy.ucsb.edu (Howard B. Owen) writes:
                            ...
>(and waited) for the A209A and 1.3 (let me add a few "and waiteds" for that
>last item), I would have had a lovely suprise when I tried to get my ST251
>to boot from power-up. Of course, the failure to boot ST506 drives is entirely
                                                       ^^^^^
>due to Seagate's "long latency" period. As if vanilla PCs hadn't been
>autobooting off the same drive hardware for years. Given CBM's long history of
>"support" for their products, I wouldn't put it at the top of my list of
>reasons to buy their hardware.

The autobooting problem exists for Seagate SCSI drives, not ST506 units. It
is not a latency problem, but rather an artifact of the Seagate design. They
decided to put their SCSI software on hidden tracks, rather than in ROM. Part
of their initialization, therefore, includes booting the software into ondrive
RAM. The advantage to this approach for them is the ability to turn around
changes to their control software more rapidly and less expensively than
masking new ROMs. The downside is that they're not ready in time to respond
to SCSI Inquiry on our autoconfiguring system.
-- 
========================================================================
  Joe O'Hara                ||  Comments represent my own opinions,
  Commodore Electronics Ltd ||  not my employers. Any similarity to
  Software QA               ||  to any other opinions, living or dead,
                            ||  is purely coincidental.
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