6 Jul
2010
6 Jul
'10
11:03 a.m.
On 7/6/10, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
I've written the list several times about the SMD drives we had on our
11/750 via a Systems Industries SI-9900 controller. The SI board in
the VAX was register-compatible with a Massbus controller, but had a
pair of 40-pin cables and was not cable-compatible.
For our boot drives, we had a 160MB Fuji drive with a transparent lid.
It appeared as a pair of RM03s to the system - DRA0: and DRA1:, IIRC.
The Fuji Eagle was *not* the same size as an RM05, so to use all the
tracks, we had to wait for the SI patch for each version of VMS
DRDRIVER.EXE to update the drive geometry table with an entry for an
Eagle in place of a real RM05. We couldn't boot from it, but it made
a great data drive. The only drawback was being stuck at the old
version of VMS until we could get up-to-date driver patches.
Fortunately, the 160MB boot drive really did look just like a pair of
RM03s and required no special handling to "just work".
-ethan
There are some
delicate hooks between the software device drivers, Massbus
registers, and the low level format that made it desirable to keep this
lowest-common-denominator there even for SMD drives that had geometries
nothing like the 9762/9766/677-51.
Yes, I remember this being a great benefit when using an Emulex QD32
to control a CDC 9762; that combination worked with RM02/RM03 packs. It
was EXTREMELY handy at work.