On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 00:32 -0500, Roger Merchberger wrote: I've been playing around with Torch Manta board which do exactly the same thing; they'll run up to 4 drives of mixed types (plus I have the relevant protocol spec). They're also to swap the function of some of the interface pins around in software too so that they'll work with a few oddball drives. They confuse the Linux low-level SCSI drivers a little as they show up as a fixed device with 4 LUNs, rather than a removeable device and so Linux expects to be able to read the first block from each LUN at startup. After all sorts of timeouts it eventually boots though :) The Mantas at least conform to the CCS; I'd like to get some of the other bridge boards around to work with Linux (e.g. Adaptec and OMTI SCSI-ST506) but they predate the CCS and so don't support some of the basic stuff expected by the Linux drivers (such as inquiry). You may find the VAX boards are the same. (I've been looking for a non-Adaptec SCSI HBA for the PC for a while so I can hack the driver to work with these boards - the Adaptec HBA in my PC also runs all the normal drives, so I don't fancy messing with it!) Of course I remember asking on this list as to whether the modulation used for floppies was a standard, and it appears not - MFM done by one manufacturer's FDC chip isn't necessarily the same as another's. Which means such a board *still* won't work with all formats even if the media's supported and it uses FM or MFM modulation. The only way to cope with that is to do all the processing in software (hence the reason I started asking about parallel ports and the like a few months back!) cheers Jules