Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 22:23:55 +0100 From: Martin Welk <mw@theatre.sax.de> To: Agent Drek <drek@MonsterByMistake.Com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: dual 400 -> dual 600 worth it? Message-ID: <19991216222355.B13659@theatre.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9912161126450.7256-100000@jazz.monsterbymistake.com>; from drek@MonsterByMistake.Com on Thu, Dec 16, 1999 at 11:45:20AM -0500 References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9912160432150.47916-100000@moo.sysabend.org> <Pine.LNX.4.10.9912161126450.7256-100000@jazz.monsterbymistake.com>
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On Thu, Dec 16, 1999 at 11:45:20AM -0500, Agent Drek wrote:
> The only time I've been *had* by a company for SCSI drives is when we
> bought an AVID. The super special AVID drives are just SCSI drives
> rigged so that the software on the mac knows that they came
> from AVID...unfortunately it is part of one's contract when buying those
(...)
In 1993 I worked for a company that used two Altos machines - x86 based
Unix machines with most of the needed chips on a large mainboard, own
bus specificiations, many serial ports, SCSI onboard and so on. Those
machines ran Altos System V Release 3.1, came with at least 8 mb of memory,
170 mb disks and 8 serial ports (386 Series 600) and we had one of these
and another with 16 serial ports, 330 mb disk and Ethernet (386 Series
1000). We enhanced the '600 to the same equipment the '1000 had (both
had also Archive 150 mb tape drives).
Altos also wanted people to buy their hard disks, although they really
never tried to tell people that those were not bought from others (no
special firmware, no special labels, just a kind of ``Altos approve-
ment'') - and 1 gbyte cost about 5000 DEM that time, not including VAT,
and I think it was bought 94 or 95, I don't remember. However, this disk
has (*) Seagate labels, but original Imprimis firmware - it was the time
when Seagate bought some hard disk manufacturers.
Okay, what the heck does all this have to do with FreeBSD? A simple thing:
this disk made problems and didn't work properly, and I wanted to know why.
So I called some people and go to know that all of Altos' modification was
some special data at the beginning of the disk! I had those ``field
diagnostics'' disk (FDX) and a necessary password, but this didn't reformat
a new drive - they didn't even trust their technicians, I guess :-)
So I put the drive into my first PC with FreeBSD (okay, than it was at
least 1994, more 1995, because 1.1-RELEASE came out in 1994) and copied
the first sectors of the disk to a file using dd. I wrote the same data
to another disk I wanted to use in the Altos machine for a while and
voila - that FDX told me, that this was a valid disk but some disk data
were corrupted (sector count and such things) - it repaired the data and
from then it worked :-)
(The reason why I built the disk into a PC was that the Altos O. S. went
to sleep when those disk trouble happened - the FreeBSD kernel gave me
more useful information :-) )
(*) I still have this ancient disk here, it's 5.25" full height, heavy,
and becomes very hot when used, is loud and slow and only SCSI-1
standard :-) (In the summer, it keeps the door open...)
Some days ago, a collegue at work used it to bring up a -CURRENT system
on a new AMD Athlon/600 based server machine, because the 18 gb LVD
drive hadn't reached us - he built FreeBSD on a 100 mbit/s NFS mounted
disk, because it was faster than the Imprimis one :-)
Good night (at least here and now),
Martin
--
/| /| | /| / ,,You know, there's a lot of opportunities,
/ |/ | artin |/ |/ elk if you're knowing to take them,
you know, there's a lot of opportunities,
Freiberg/Saxony, Germany if there aren't you can make them,
mw@sax.de / mw@theatre.sax.de make or break them!'' (Tennant/Lowe)
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