the wonders of SCSI

[neese at adaptex.UUCP]

>>SCSI Easy?!?!?!
>>
>>HA!
>>I'v just spent the evening and night tring to get a maxtor 330MB scsi up
>>and working with ISC 2.0.2.  The drive is there, but there is no manual
>>entries to RTFM for getting the thing integrated into the damn system.
>>
>
>Greg -
>
>	I can sympathize with you.  I've done many, _MANY_ installations of
>ISC 2.0.2 (don't get excited, ISC - it's always the same machine!) with ESDI,
>RLL, SCSI drives.  The easiest time I ever had was with a SCSI: Adaptec 1542A
>plus CDC/IMPRIMIS/S-word Wren V or VI (I forget - the 600 Mbyte goodie).  The
>worst time I ever had (am still having) is eggzactly the same machine (Everex
>STEP/25) and above compoments EXCEPT replace the CDC/IMPRIMIS/S-word drive with
>a MAXTOR XT-3280 that a co-worker found laying around in our (internal) PC
>Service center that they didn't know what to do with.  
>
>	This Maxtor has been a royal pain in the ass!  The only thing that
>will reliably format it is the scsicntl program from adaptec: even the
>internal (BIOS) formatter can't create a reliably-writable disk!  (Symptom:
>DOS's fdisk acts as though it's creating a partition table but after
>rebooting - expecting to do the high-level DOS format, you find the
>partition table hasn't been created!).  I had better luck formatting it with
>a WD 7000ASC controller (fairly old - it's not a FAST version) and that
>worked fine - but I can't run UNIX on that controller.

I have posted this many times, but some still haven't figured it out.  The
3000 series drive from Maxtor does not comply with the SCSI standard.  It
violates the arbitration scheme of SCSI.  There may be other problems, but
that is the worst one of all.  I got some mail recently that many folks are
saying that the 154x adapter cannot support multiple drives reliably.  In
all cases, the drives were the 3280S Maxtor/Newbury.  The 154x adapter cannot
and will not work reliably with a SCSI device that does not adhere to the
SCSI standard.  The SCSI protocol on the 154x is done in hardware and not
software.  Save yourself a lot of grief and do not use these devices on the
154x adapter.

			Roy Neese
			Adaptec Senior SCSI Applications Engineer
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