Fuji 2266SA problem

[R. Michael Townsend]

> 
> Does anyone have experience with Fujitsu 2266SA disks in power series
> workstations?  I've installed these disks in three of our hosts (a
> 4D/210, a 4D/320 and a 4D/340 all running Irix 3.3.2), and they seemed
> to work fine.  However, now that they are getting serious use, I've
> begun to see this message appear in SYSLOG:
> 
> 	dks0d2s10: Unrecoverable device error: Internal controller error.
> 

I am quite familiar with this!  Our situation: a 4D/380 with several 2266's
and several 2263's, 9 track tape, 8mm, and QIC all on an IO2; OS: IRIX 3.3.2.
The above messages which left us dead in the water for a week basically (the 
2263's failed to work again (even when putting them back on a PI (which is where
they were originally formatted))), started when we installed an IO3 to
allow even more SCSI devices.  I ended up doing the following: going back
to the IO2 until separate (off line) tests can be run on a similarly
configured machine with an IO3; leaving off some of the devices I wanted
connected to our machine (there are no SCSI slots free); and attempting to
minimize the cable lengths used in connecting all the devices.  In past lives
(e.g. VAX days), I have always found length limitations on buses to be very
good source of spurious bad peripheral behavior, current technology is no
exception.  Supposedly SCSI bus length max is 6 meters -- adding up all the
devices I have on my system currently, I seem to be WAY OVER spec.  The IO2
seems to tolerate this more than the IO3.  There may be other
incompatibilities that I do not know about, which is why the investigation
continues (especially since I want to reattatch all my devices and can not
in the current IO2 configuration).

INQUIRY and synchronous jumpers closed on the disks WILL NOT WORK.  This too
is being investigated as I very much want to increase the speed of all the
Fuji's I have on the machine.

If SG doesn't make some blanket announcement on configurational guidelines
in this matter when all is "resolved", I will do so those interested (the
volume of which seems to grow daily).

						R. Michael Townsend
						townsend at rainbow.uchicago.edu