non-apple disks

[Mark Bartelt]

[ me ]

| Granted that *formatting* is (or, at least, can be) very drive-specific.  But
| I don't understand why partitioning can't be supported for all drives.  [ ... ]
| It's my impression that HD SC Setup sniffs the drive, notices that it isn't an
| Apple drive, and refuses to deal with it in any way, even though it could, if
| it wanted to, do things like define the partitions.

[ Bill Pearson ]

|         Contrary to several comments about non-Apple disks, many unix
| manufacturers make it easy both to format and partition third-party disks.
| It is my understanding that "formatting" a SCSI-disk is very standard, 

Yes, thanks for the correction.  My brain must have been in SMD mode rather
then SCSI mode when I made the above comment about formatting possibly being
problematical.

[ Kent Sandvik ]

| Well, here we go again. Let me give another example of how hard it is to support
| third party vendor SCSI disks. The general assumption is that a hard disk should
| start with asynchonous mode, and start a form of handshaking talking with the other
| end if they want synchronous mode, and at what speeds. 
|
| Well, there are hard disks out there that maybe or possibly starts immediately in
| synchronous mode, and wonders why the Mac does not talk with them.

A disk that behaves that way is broken.  Unless I'm mistaken (if so, please
correct me), the async/sync negotiation is part of the SCSI *standard*, not
just a "general assumption".  A drive that starts out in synchronous mode
without getting an OK from the other end isn't following the standard, and
its manufacturer should be loudly screamed at.  I don't think any rational
customer would fault Apple for not being able to deal with a drive which
violates the SCSI spec!

|                                                                    If we said that 
| HD Setup would work with *any* hard disk, and a customer gets into trouble to a similar
| case, then we are liable.

We don't expect you to promise to support *any* hard disk.  At least, not
disks which don't conform to the SCSI spec.  But it would be nice if you
*did* support well-behaved drives.  Note that you don't really even *have*
to guarantee that you will:  Other vendors, recognizing that people want
to plug Brand X disks into their systems, provide support for generic SCSI
devices, while also providing themselves an escape hatch in the form of a
disclaimer which says that they can't guarantee that arbitrary devices which
they themselves do not sell will actually work.  In practice, this approach
works just fine.  *All* of our other UNIX boxes are capable of formatting,
partitioning, and happily using a wide variety of SCSI drives.  Sun does it,
SGI does it, DEC does it ...  Apple could, too, if they really wanted to.
But instead, it seems (again, correct me if I'm wrong) that HD SC Setup will
refuse to even try to partition the drive unless it first recognizes it as an
Apple-supplied drive.

|                           Anyway, things are happening, so let's see what next year
| will bring.

Looking forward to some major improvements, in this area and in others ...

Mark Bartelt                                                    416/978-5619
Canadian Institute for                                 mark at cita.toronto.edu
Theoretical Astrophysics                               mark at cita.utoronto.ca