Need Help with A2091's

[caliban_6]

Hello all,

I just picked up two A2091's with no HD's on the cheap.  What is a good hard drive that will work with these cards?  Or is there such a thing?  (I am talking about new SCSI HD's).

Thanks,

Jeremy Hastings

[Tahoe]

First check the version of the ROM's on the card. If they are 7.0 you can use basically any 50pins SCSI drive, if they are 6.6 or lower you can not use drives larger than 1GB.
You can but you can only use 1GB effectively. If you get a 2GB drive partition it only half! (found this out the hard way)

[caliban_6]

So if I have the 7.0 ROM I can go out and buy a 100 GB HD as long as it is 50 pin SCSI?

Just want to make sure I understand correctly.

[Tahoe]

Never tried larger than a 9.1GB
50Pins disks are the older type, you won't find a 100GB 50Pins SCSI disk  :-D

Mind you, if you want to use a disk larger than 4GB you need OS3.9, i think.

Best bet would be to get yourself a nice 2.1 or 4.3GB disk, dead cheap and works fine in your miggy.

[melott]

Actually.. I don't think you will find any 'NEW'
50 pin drives unless it is NOS (new old stock).
I talked to a tech support a few months ago and
was told 'none of the manufactures make 50 pin
drives anymore'.
You'll probably have to settle for a used one
and its a Crap Shoot weather you get a good one
or not.

[TjLaZer]

The largest 50-pin SCSI drive I have ever seen is a 18GB Seagate (Full Height), and I have it installed in my A3000T ! :banana:

[Ilwrath]

The largest 50-pin SCSI drive I have ever seen is a 18GB Seagate (Full Height), and I have it installed in my A3000T !

I have a 36GB half-height 50-pin SCSI-2 Fast (Seagate Barracuda) I bought new about two years ago in my SGI Indigo 2.  :-)  

Seagate was still making the Barracuda line with this interface up until fairly recently.

I imagine you could use one of the newer Barracuda drives with the 68-pin interface and one of these adaptors.

[doctorq]

Or use a IDE drive along with an ACard adaptor like this one.

[PhilMoore]

You could adapter an LVD (68 pin) drive to 50 pin.
 
I used one of these to do it:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=6738400636&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT

I connected to my blizzard 2060, so I am not sure if this will work with your 2091.

It did not work on my 2091, but I don't have the new ROMs.  I expect that is why it didn't see the drive.  If you have the v7 roms as mentioned earlier, it may work.

[melott]

PhilMoore wrote:
You could adapter an LVD (68 pin) drive to 50 pin.
-------------
 
I have a couple of these adaptors and the only drives
I could get them to work on are 'Quantum' drives.

IMHO I would prefer to take my chances on a used
50 pin drive.
I found a NOS Quantum 3.2 gig 50 pin drive on EBay
awhile back. I have it stashed away until I need it :-D

[PhilMoore]

Quantum is the drive I am using.  I didn't know it wouldn't work with other brands.  That is good to know.

[JimS]

It's been my experience that with the older firmware, you cant even use drives bigger than 1GB. They may look like they have been partitioned, but once you reboot, they disappear again. That may be specific to a drive model I suppose. I have 2 2GB Seagates rescued from a Sun box that I can't use on the 2091.

[Floid]

PhilMoore wrote:
You could adapter an LVD (68 pin) drive to 50 pin.
 
I used one of these to do it:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=6738400636&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT

I connected to my blizzard 2060, so I am not sure if this will work with your 2091.

It did not work on my 2091, but I don't have the new ROMs.  I expect that is why it didn't see the drive.  If you have the v7 roms as mentioned earlier, it may work.

Let me warn about something wacky here.  Well, first, only "Ultra2" and beyond are LVD, and the point is that all of those will fall back to "SE" on a "SE" bus, so they aren't really being "LVD" once they're cabled up.  (Watch out for old HVD stuff, that's not compatible.)

Those adapters are usually 'straight through,' meaning the high byte pins are just left hanging.  *Many* drives will apparently tolerate this; either they switch on termination for those lines automatically, or just don't care, and since those lines can't interfere with the first 8 for the "low byte," you never notice.

However, I had at least one fun adventure with some IBM DFHS drives (IIRC), that came without onboard termination packs of any sort (perhaps this was the problem, I'm not sure) -- these puppies would not wake up with a plain cheap adapter, and only then did I know to go on the hunt for a high-byte terminating adapter.

Those latter are somewhat more expensive and hard to find (since people selling rarely know anything about SCSI), but include a termination pack on the unused (the 'high' 8 bits of the 16-bit bus) lines, which keeps things to spec, and pretty much guarantees the drive will wake up and talk happily on the bus.

So if you have to assemble a collection of wide-to-narrow SCSI adapters, I'd just get the "high-byte terminating" style from the get-go.  Bonus points if you can just find a single adapter to run a 68-pin cable from, then you can have as many drives as you want (just enable termination on the last wide one, of course).

As example:

[Controller]--[50-pin_CD-ROM]--<==[Drive]==[Drive]==[Terminated_Drive]

...Where the "<" is a high-byte terminated 50-68, and = is the 68 pin cable.

[OTOH, you're not exactly going to get ultra speeds off the 2091, so I'd also just use a cheap surplus 50-pin drive if you can find one. ;-)]