Adding a 3'rd party disk drive to PI

[Dave Olson]

In <1010 at ki.UUCP> dwatts at ki.UUCP (Dan Watts) writes:

| I'm about to add another 3'rd party disk drive to my PI and I've got a
| few questions.  I currently have an external 3'rd party tower which has
| two empty drive bays and one Wren 6.  I'm trying to decide between getting
| ~700MB or 1.2GB.  One of the dealers I talked with said the PI can't
| access/address past the 1GB range on a drive.  Does anyone have any
| information on this?  Their actual experience was with a 1.6GB drive.
| 
| Can the Iris make full use of a 1.2GB drive?  The specific model I'm
| looking at is a Wren 7.
| 
| If I can't use the Wren 7, then I've got a choice between getting another
| Wren 6 (so far it's worked fine for me) and getting a Hitachi DK515.
| Has anyone had any experience using the Hitachi?

Yes, the PI doesn't have the same braindead scsi driver that all but
the most recent Sun and Ultrix releases had.  They were using 6 byte
SCSI cmds, and that caused the block number to wrap at 1Gb.  SGI has
always used the 10 byte commands, and there is no problem with drives
greater than 1Gb formatted.  The Wren VII is a pretty good drive, and
is one that we resell, so you should see no problems with it.  The 515
seems to be slower, and has higher command overhead than the Wren VII.

--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.