hooking up 3rd party drives?

[Dave Olson]

In <31783 at hydra.gatech.EDU> gt1111a at prism.gatech.EDU (Vincent Fox) writes:

| Any words of wisdom on hooking up SCSI drives on a Personal Iris?
| 
| Those 1/2 height 5-1/4" drives are just too darned expensive. I'm looking
| at 760 meg in a shoebox for about $2K. Where in the PI should I try to
| hook in the external SCSI cable. The only point-of-attack I see without
| taking the PI apart is the extra 50 pin connecter in the back of the
| empty 1/2 height slot above the tape drive. I could get some 50pin ribbon
| cable and route it out of the PI here, unless there is a better point to
| connect. 

No; you want to use the external SCSI connector, in the back
next to the I/O panel; that is what it is there for.  It is
the standard SCSI pinout for that that connector (as spec'ed
in the SCSI 1 standard).  Note that the pinout is NOT the same
as the numbers molded into the connector!  You should be
able to get the correct cable at most large mail order or
computer supply operations.  The connector in the top slot
doesn't match any standard, and isn't likely to match any
cable you can find, except by pure happenstance.

| More importantly, will IRIX be able to format and recognize any 3rd party
| drives? I would think so, but I'm looking to be sure before I jump in.

Well, not ANY 3rd party drive, but it should work with just about
any drive that conforms to the CCS addition to SCSI 1, or with
any SCSI 2 compliant drive, assuming you are using IRIX 3.3 or 
later.  Use the fx program to initialize and partition the
drive.