On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 08:40, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: ARG! I played with all of these (and continually cursed the day I first had to deal with them) while I was developing SCSI stuff at IBM. When I delt with the Tahiti-1 it had continuous microcode updates and the optical cartidges were not compatible with anyone else's. The major problems with these drives is that they reported honestly what they were (r/w optical drives). However, all of the PC code (BIOS, DOS, etc) thought optical drives were CD-ROMs and were utterly confused by anything that wasn't (especially 512 byte sector optical drives...and ones that didn't have the RO bit set). More reasonable OS's (aka UN*X) handled these beasts a bit better but the drives themselves were *always* a headache. As someone previously mentioned, ISA DMA is fiddly at best. Go do this on a PCI machine. You probably also want to make sure that the SCSI HBA is configured for single ended and 5MB/sec or lower (ie async). These SCSI interfaces on these drives are old and they will probably get very confused with the more modern auto-config stuff. -- TTFN - Guy

Jerome Fine replies: I am not sure if my experience will help or not, but just in case: BUT, first I should mention that I use an Adaptec PCI card: an AHA-2940AU with the MO drives on the external connector, so my experience MIGHT not apply to the ISA 1532 card, although, IIRC, I think was using a 1532 card in my old system about 3 years ago with about the same sort of problems! I have used both Pinnacle Micro REO-650 and Sony SMO S-501 drives at the same time on the same daisy chain. In general, I rarely have difficulty when there are multiple Sony drives on the SCSI bus. However, the Pinnacle REO drives are probably NOT cabled correctly since they usually are a problem, especially when the Pinnacle MO drive is the first in the chain. If you look inside the box, my experience has been that the centronics 50-pin connectors are NOT at the ends of the cable connected to the drive; with my Pinnacle REO-650 drive, the drive is at the END of the cable and one of the 50-pin centronics connectors is connected to the middle. While this configuration does not always cause a problem, even when there are just 2 MO drives (including 1 Pinnacle REO-650 drive), at this point, I ALWAYS avoid using any Pinnacle REO-650 drives UNLESS it is just ONE drive on the SCSI daisy chain. In addition, even when I used ALL Sony SMO S-501 drives, I found that the AHA-2940AU was NOT able to support more that 3 such Sony SMO S-501 drives, IIRC! I might have used 4 drives 1 or 2 times, but certainly NOT on a regular basis since the SCSI daisy chain seemed unable to support more than 3 SMO drives in my system. NOTE, however, that part of the problem could have been a rather long SCSI cable (about 6 feet) prior to where the first Sony SMO S-501 drive was connected to the SCSI daisy chain. For a while, I was using the 3 * Sony SMO S-501 drives under Windows 98 SE with E11 and RT-11. I also had a Sony SMO S-501 drive on a real DEC PDP-11 system with a CQD 220/TM SCSI host adapter. The primary purpose was for backup on both the PC and the PDP-11, but on some occasions, I used the MO media in production on the PC at the end of the session with a RAM: disk under E11 as the active RT-11 device since the MO media were so slow. Sellam, does this information help? Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.