26 Jun
2006
26 Jun
'06
10:13 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
No QuadX configuration can be considered 'common', surely?
true. Although I believe only the later ones generally got SCSI drives -
earlier ones had bridge boards fitted and lower-capacity ST506 drives.
Torch QaudX.
Mine use SCSI drives luckily
(although I gather it's more common for them to a Manta board for the floppy (for the rst of the
people here, Torch
boards were named after water creatures, the mainboard in a XXX is a
Stickleback, the memory expansion board for that is a Limpet, and so on).
The never-happened QuadX memory board was to be called Mussel, by the way.
XXXes had either the Omti board (which linked to a
floppy drive and an
ST412 hard disk [1]) or the SCSI hard disk and a Manta.
I *think* they'll work with anything. There's a flag in the first sector on
the drive that says which bridge board is being used (or cleared if the unit's
pure SCSI). I suppose at boot time the firmware pulls the first block off the
disk, sets the drive geometry on the bridge board accordingly, and from then
on they all work the same way.
In practice, I think they all got Omti boards as you say. There were a handful
of Emulex, Adaptec and Xebec bridges amongst all my ex-workshop stock though,
so they obviously played around with them at least.
[1] The original Torch hard drives were NEC units, and
they are
well-known for developping stiction...
Yep. I had a couple with that problem this last week when I was digging around
my Torch stuff. Luckily the spindles are exposed on the underside; they're not
completely sealed units and so can be given a helping hand.
cheers
Jules