Conner 3200 and 4.1: It finally works

[Stu Brown]

After chasing down a problem with my Conner 3200 200M drive and Sun OS 4.1
on a SparcStation for a month, it is finally resolved.

The drive worked fine with 4.0.3c but gave me a "Transport failed" and
timeout error under 4.1. With the help of a Sun engineer responsible for
SCSI drivers, we were able to place the blame on the drive. Initially,
Conner had no idea what the problem could be, but one of their enginners
looked at the analysis by the Sun person and decided that I needed a
firmware upgrade.

I sent the drive to an engineer at Conner to have it updgraded fast - the
vendor who sold me the drive recommended this over going through official
(RMA) channels. I called him after a few days and found out he had left
Conner and Conner could not find my drive! After three days they found my
drive. It was upgraded to Rev. 2.03 and returned to me.  At hte same time,
the Sun engineer got a drive to try from Conner and it worked under 4.1.
When I got my drive, a month after purchasing it, it also worked perfectly
under 4.1.

I have assembled the disk and an Archive 150M tape into my own "shoebox"
and am using it with my SparcStation SLC. It all works flawlessly. I saved
over $1000 from third party shoeboxes and more than that on Sun desktop
storage packs (they only offer 100M and 350M). Total cost was about $1800.

Stuart Brown
Mentor Graphics Corporation
Silicon Design Division (N.J.)
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