Large drives off of a Decstation 3100

[Mark Bartelt]

In article <12232 at jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
jjensen at jarthur.claremont.edu (Jeff Jensen) writes:

| We're running Ultrix 4.1 Rev 52 off of a DecStation 3100.  We are in the
| process of getting a new drive, of about 1.2gig.  Now to the question...
| For some reason, I seem to remember hearing that there were problems
| running a disk of this size under Ultrix.  Is this true, and if so, are
| there any patches?  Any information/pointers to places to look would be
| appreciated.

Although I rarely use Ultrix these days, I'll make a moderately educated
guess (since I haven't seen any other replies, authoritative or otherwise,
to your question).  The following article from comp.sys.sgi implies that,
yes, there is (or at least was) a problem with Ultrix and large drives.
But it also suggests that these problems may have been fixed recently.
Maybe someone from DEC will provide information more accurate than my
random surmises.  (C'mon Fred, where are ya? ;-)

| From: olson at anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
| Subject: Re: Adding a 3'rd party disk drive to PI
| Message-ID: <1991Jun7.204440.1988 at odin.corp.sgi.com>
| Date: 7 Jun 91 20:44:40 GMT
| References: <1010 at ki.UUCP>
| Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
|
| In <1010 at ki.UUCP> dwatts at ki.UUCP (Dan Watts) writes:
|
| |   [ ... ]
| |
| | Can the Iris make full use of a 1.2GB drive?  The specific model I'm
| | looking at is a Wren 7.
| |
| |   [ ... ]
|
| Yes, the PI doesn't have the same braindead scsi driver that all but
| the most recent Sun and Ultrix releases had.  They were using 6 byte
| SCSI cmds, and that caused the block number to wrap at 1Gb.  SGI has
| always used the 10 byte commands, and there is no problem with drives
| greater than 1Gb formatted.  The Wren VII is a pretty good drive, and
| is one that we resell, so you should see no problems with it.

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