3rd party disk/tape on RS/6000?

[Andreas Kaiser]

 >Is it possible to attach 3rd party SCSI disks to a RS/6000? 
 >(Model 550)  How

Yes, at least on a 320 with SCSI controller. I don't know if it is possible to *replace* the internal drive by a 3rd party product, since when I tried this, the tape-booted system refused to install on the disk, but it runs fine with a 1GB Wren VII as secondary disk (which has double capacity and costs about half of IBMs largest disk drive). 

IBM's docs tell something about external SCSI connections beeing limited to 2 devices, when both internal and external SCSI devices are installed (they don't tell a reason), but this obviously is not an enforced limitation, since we have 3 external drives installed.

I tested an original Tandberg 3660 tape on the RS/6000, which is mechanically identical to the drive from IBM, but it didn't work. It did rewind but no other commands were possible ("the system call received a parameter, that is not valid"). The reason might be, that IBM's tape has another firmware (the Tandberg version does not support ECC) and the SCSI driver on the 6000 perhaps requires some special fields in the SCSI commands. Since the Tandberg drive is SCSI-1 compatible (don't know about SCSI-2 since







 I have not found the standard yet), the 6000 is not SCSI-1 compatible, concerning streaming tape drives. You'd better be careful when bying a 3rd party gigabyte tape drive.

                Gruss, Andreas

 * Origin: kaiser at ananke.stgt.sub.org - Stuttgart FRG (2:244/7014)