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| Insane SCSI to FW prices |
Posted by: bibilit on 2018-10-11 23:50:19
Yes, same problem expected on NeXT hardware, only very few CD-Rom drives will work for the very same reason.
SGI Indys are the long pole here. Macs will usually accept just about anything in the way of a SCSI CD-ROM drive but older SGI machines (and older SUN boxes as well) require CD-ROM drives that identify themselves as supporting 512 byte block size at power-on instead of the normal 2048
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Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2018-10-12 07:07:21
FWIW, Plextor SCSI drives can be jumpered to 512 or 2048 byte blocks.
Regarding high prices of FW to SCSI bridges. They were a transition adapter that outlived its usefulness. Its not surprising that they didn't hang around long.... just enough until folks replaced their SCSI stuff with Firewire or USB and even than it was only really targeted at Mac users.
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Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-12 10:41:50
Oh, I have a Toshiba drive like that in my Indigo2! I had no idea they were rare. I think that's the same drive Sun used in the Sparcstation 4/5s.
In any case, if you have one of these in your Indigo you're probably set if you ever need to boot the Indy. Just yank it out of the Indigo and connect it up to the internal SCSI port on the Indy with a long cable as a temporary expedient. (You can make a power extender fairly easily if necessary.)
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Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2018-10-12 11:11:24
Just be very careful with those Toshiba XM series tray loaders. The motorized eject mechanism is very fragile and can induce rage when it breaks.
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?40455-Toshiba-SCSI-CD-ROM-Drives
The computer store I used to work at sold a bunch of machines with the IDE version of these drives, and within a year the vast majority were replaced since they refused to eject the tray.
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-12 19:14:37
Mine just kinda pops open, I'm not sure it's motorized at all.
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Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-12 22:38:30
Yeah, in my recollection those 1" drives used in the UNIX workstations are basically like fat laptop drives?
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Posted by: Unknown_K on 2018-10-13 18:08:52
Much more solidly built and using a standard interface.
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Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-13 19:18:29
Much more solidly built and using a standard interface. I was referring to their basic design, IE, when you hit eject essentially the whole mechanism (which is tethered to the frame/back panel with a ribbon cable) comes forward on slides, there's no "tray" per se. Obviously they are not literally "fat laptop drives".
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Posted by: rsolberg on 2018-10-13 22:15:51
On the 512 byte block size optical drive topic, VAXStations also required it to boot. I wonder if this was a de facto standard among UNIX workstations of the era?
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Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-15 11:25:18
I wonder if this was a de facto standard among UNIX workstations of the era? I think it's mostly just an artifact of the early UNIX machines essentially not having any (or very little, anyway) explicit understanding of CD-ROM drives in their firmware; you need that to boot from a more modern "standard" drive, while a CD-ROM drive that supports 512 byte blocks can at boot time be treated as if it were a hard disk. (At the very most basic level I believe even a SCSI *tape* drive that used 512 byte blocks can use the same generic commands to do an IPL; obviously once you have a kernel in memory you need to start treating them differently.)
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