Non-Apple HDs for A/UX

[Phil Ronzone]

In article <1897 at udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> pez at vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Daniel J Pezely) writes:
>
>
>	I heard that A/UX was "designed" to be used on a Apple HD or
>whatever drive is in there (it's a Quantum, isn't it?).  By "designed"
>I mean that disk responce time on other drives will be less than optimal and 
>also that there could be other problems.  Could anyone shed some light on 
>this and hopefully say that it is all nonsence?

Yes, it is nonsense. The A/UX SCSI Manager/Driver was explicitly designed
to support any "reasonable" SCSI disk drive. The catch is twofold:

    1). What is "reasonable"? We were pragmatic, and tried as many of
        the third party drives as we could get our hands on. This was
        a pretty informal process. We ended up with Quantum, Seagate, CDC,
        and Micropolis drives, plus several that used a DPT "SCSI caching"
        controller. We have gotten reports that Toshiba and Hitachi and
        other drives work from third parties & contractors.

    2). It IS the A/UX Manager/Driver. Since A/UX boots via the Mac OS,
        if you wish to boot off your non-Apple drive, you must have the
        drive's vendor provide the Mac OS bootstrap software and (often) the
        Mac OS disk partitioning software. So even if A/UX handles the
        drive, at times there is no Mac OS driver software to boot off of it.

Apple wants to promote as general a SCSI Manager/Driver as reasonably
can be done. We don't sell 160MB, 320MB and so on disk drives (yet :-) ).
And those sizes are very popular in the UNIX world.

I would ask that any success/horror stories be emailed or AppleLinked to
me. If there are enough replies, I can post a summary. But we will also
take into account the stories for future improvements etc. on the A/UX
SCSI Manager/Driver.

SUMMARY: Naw, we didn't do mean things to slow down or sabotage non-Apple
disk drives. They supported they same as Apple drives. But do doublecheck
your interleave and other such factors if your drive appears slow.
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| Philip K. Ronzone      | A/UX System Architect | APPLELINK: RONZONE1        |
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