Problems with 3rd party drive

[Pavel Rozalski]

We have a Xylogics 754 VME hard disk controller with a Seagate Sabre
9720 1 GB drive on an SGI PowerSeries. Unfortunately this doesn't
work. We have had the disk, cables and controller replaced several
times but it still doesn't work. What happens is that sometimes bits
get flipped when writing files. This is quite reproducible. When
copying 25 2.5 MB files, about 5 to 15 copies will have errors in them.
The OS does not detect this. I tried putting the controller in another
slot, but this did not improve the situation.

There is a virtually identical hardware configuration on another
PowerSeries Iris at this university which works perfectly.

Has anyone seen problems like these before?

Pavel Rozalski
Dynamic Graphics Project
University of Toronto
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