SCSI timeouts

[David Hinds]

In article <822 at ki.UUCP> dwatts at ki.UUCP (Dan Watts) writes:
>
>Lately I've been getting a few errors like
>
>  sc0,2: Resetting SCSI bus: timeout after 60 sec
>
>These seem to occur randomly and infrequently.  My setup is
>a Personal Iris with QIC-24, QIC-150, internal 350MB+ drive
>and an external 650MB+ drive.  I don't recall seeeing this
>error before I put the external drive on.  All the hardware
>works fine otherwise.  I was able to get the error to repeat
>itself today by trying to tar some files from the external
>drive to a 3M DC615A tape in the QIC-150 drive.  Should I
>put my external disk at a lower SCSI address than the tape
>drives?

    We had SGI install a pair of external 3rd-party 720MB SCSI drives for
our 4D-240 system a few months ago.  They were CDC drives, but I forget the
model numbers.  Anyway, it was a model that SGI did not officially endorse
(they didn't bother telling us before charging us to install them, but
that's another story...).  We noticed the same SCSI timeout messages from
time to time.  We also noticed that data tended to not get written to the
drive from time to time, and long batch jobs reading/writing that drive
tended to disappear without trace.  So, we ended up sending back the drives
and getting one from SGI (costing maybe twice as much).  If I were you,
I would take a good look at whether you are losing any data, and try to
give the drive a good workout.

 -David Hinds
  dhinds at popserver.stanford.edu