1 Gigabyte drives

[Doug Pintar]

In article <1991Feb23.201754.2275 at cichlid.com> aab at cichlid.com (Andy Burgess) writes:
>In article <1991Feb20.220548.6054 at news.larc.nasa.gov> jka at radar0.larc.nasa.gov (J. Keith Alston) writes:
>>
>> Hello,
>>     I'm running interactive unix 2.2 and am looking into 1 Gb. SCSI
>>     drives. I have the Adaptec 1542A controller and am thinking about
>>     a Fujitsu drive because of the 5 yr warrenty. Anyone out there have
>>     any experience good or bad, with 1 Gb. drives under ISC 2.2? Any help
>>     would be appreciated.
>
>I am posting because I found a good price for Fujitsu drives recently.
>$1470 for 660Mb and $2266 for 1.2 Gb from R-squared, 415 438 0800.
>
I replied by mail to the original poster, but it's probably a good idea to
put this out to the net in general.  There has been a problem reported with
drives > 1GB, at least using the Adaptec 154x SCSI host adapter.  There seems
to be some sort of overflow problem such that all disk addresses are
interpreted as modulo 1 GB.  This means that the last 200 MB on a 1.2 GB drive
will wrap around to the beginning of the drive, trashing whatever is there.
This is being investigated.  As a temporary work-around, you can tell the
system that the drive is limited to 1024 virtual (1 MB) "cylinders" and things
seem to be ok.
Cheers,
DLP