CDC WREN-V's : any experience

[Mike Vevea]

We've got several, two on 3/50's and one on a 4/110.  We've never had
problems with them under OS4.0, but they didn't seem to work well under a
couple of situations:  

1) I didn't try too hard, but they did not run reliably under OS3.4; I
   could sometimes read them, but if I left them mounted for more than
   a few seconds, or attempted any real I/O from them, the system crashed.
2) they don't seem to work well with other disks on the same SCSI controller
   (the CPU end that is).  We had problems running them as a second drive
   when the first drive was either another Wren V or a Sun shoebox 140M drive.
   (The symptoms were:  we could usually write with no problems, but we
   frequently got bad reads.)  

Still, they are a good cheap disk, and I've been quite happy with them as
long as I didn't try using them with another drive on the same system.  I
have purchased more, and suggested that others do the same, given the
limitations I've mentioned.  (Also, I haven't really pursued the problems.
There may be a simple way around them, but I only needed multiple disks
until I could get a boot image on the WrenV, so I just worked around the
problem rather than trying for a real solution.)

mikeV  (mike at poa.nrel.colostate.edu   or   vevea at csugold.bitnet)