CompuServe Messages

Every drive decides for itself (via the setting in Hdtoolbox) whether it is going to do reselection. However, if one drive is going to be doing reselection, then there are reselection messages going across the scsi bus; a controller with a bug in its reselection code could become confused, and cause the SCSI bus to lock up. So basically, you should either keep reselection on for all drives or off for all drives. Reselection does cause some additional overhead, so things will slow down a bit as more messages need to be passed around. For some reason, reselection gives everyone trouble; so there are a fair number of bugs in the reselection code of both drives and host adapters. You should turn reselection off on all your drives if you are using Syquest, unless you know for sure that your Syquests have the rom revision that supports reselection properly. Syquest had as much trouble as C= getting reselection right 🙂 The advantage of backing up, reformatting, and restoring is that the new FFS does a better job in layout of the files and blocks on the disk. You'll have less fragmentation in the future, and access will be sped up now. andy