300 Meg drives with A/UX

[Tim Tessin]

In article <805 at a.lanl.gov> chn at a.lanl.gov (Charles Neil) writes:
> 
> Does anyone have running on a 300 Meg drive, a sizeable Unix partition and
> a sizeable Mac OS partition?  I'm looking for such a drive to escape the
> size limitations of the 80SC, and I would like to hear about compatible
> drivers.  Most manufacturers I have talked to say "Yeah, it should work",
> or "It's supposed to be compatible with A/UX, but we don't support it".
> I'm interested in people's actual experience, good or bad.  Thanks.
> 
I tried responding by direct mail, but it bounced.

I am running a MicroNet SBX-620.  This is a 600 Mb Wren V (16ms).  
My price was $3,345.  They also make a SBX-300 and 150 (16.5ms).

I used dp(1) to partition it from my HD80.  I hear you can do it from
the 6.0.2 HDSetup now as well, but I haven't tried it.
I have a 60mb Apple MacOS partition, a 60mb (same as the / on the HD80)
root partition, a 150mb and 300mb partition, plus the extras (swap, esch, etc).
I duplicated the / partition so I could use the HD80 as an online backup
for the / partition on my 600mb drive.  The HD80 is not mounted normally,
and the system runs completely off of the big drive. 
I have had some problems with the disk drive, it occasionally turns a
deaf ear on very heavy activity (large file transfers) and I get a
SCSI Reset message.  MicroNet is working on it and suspects a disk driver
problem.  However, I only get this a couple of times a month.  Hopefully,
it will be fixed soon. They suspect "blind reads and writes" are not
supported properly, but I am no disk expert. Anyway, it is not a real
drawback, I would still recommend the disk.  The apple ethernet card is
far more unreliable.

Dp is not fun, but it gets the job done.  Use the dp information from the
HD80 to guide you in partitioning your other disk.  If you don't want to
run the system off of the new disk, your partitioning job is much easier,
just partition the 300mb for the extra partitions you need (probably not
more than 2). Oh yes, the MacOS partiton must reside on your boot disk.
The unix root system can reside on any disk.  One alternative would be
to set up unix on the 300mb and reformat the 80 for MacOS.

Hope this helps

Tim Tessin - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory  
PHONE: (415) 423-4560 
ARPA:  tjt at tis.llnl.gov
UUCP:  {ames,lll-crg,lll-lcc,mordor}!lll-tis!tjt