26 May
1999
26 May
'99
9:51 a.m.
ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
Most later workstations had SCSI interfaces for the
hard disk (even if
they then broke that by insisting on an ST506 drive on the other side of
a SCSI->ST506 interface, as ICL and Torch both did). Some older
Sun did this too. It wasn't 'til SunOS 4.0 that the SCSI-disk driver
would actually talk to SCSI disks. Before that, it wanted to talk to
an Adaptec ACB4000 or an Emulex MD21 (for ESDI disks).
I think I remember reading somewhere that this was done because the
SCSI-to-whatever interface had the intelligence for bad-block
remapping. But I wouldn't be surprised to find that the cost of the
drives had something to do with it; I remember Amiga folks scheming to
use ACB4000 boards with their SCSI interfaces because it was cheaper
than buying a SCSI disk, and I've opened a few Mac SCSI hard disk
boxes to find the same sort of thing inside.
-Frank McConnell