CompuServe Thread

Qunatum SCSI Drives

3 messages in this thread
#4676From: Dave LoveOct 26, 1990 8:14 PM
Boy, you go away for a few months and everything changes! With all the new Amiga forums, I'm cot quite certain where to put this message, but here goes… I just picked up a Quantum 105MB SCSI drive and want to hook it up to my 2090A controller (yep, 2090A. yech!). Unfortunately, the drive came with no information at all, so I have no idea what to set my MountList entries to. So, before I start playing hit-n-miss with all the parameters, has anyone else hooked up a similar beast? If so, I'd appreciate any hints you can give me. On a related note, I realize that some of the MountList entries are meaningless for SCSI devices. Can anyone tell me which ones? Thanks, Dave Love
#4796From: BILL LEACHOct 28, 1990 7:55 AM
Dave; Heads, Blocks per track, number of cylinders are meaningless by themselves, though the total number of blocks represented by these entries for all partitions must be equal to or less that the total number of blocks on the drive (preferably less). For Amiga Dos reasons, you need to set up a device "RESx:" for that drive that you will configure using prep. That should be set up exactly as given in the CBM docs (cyls 0 and 1) except that you will make your own entries for blocks per track and number of heads. Your drive should have about 205,080 blocks on it. Expect to be able to use about 185,000 and set your mountlist accordingly. You don't have to partition your drive but give some thought to how long a backup/restore operation would take for 100MegBytes of data! Around 40Meg is a good partition value. You might also give consideration to making all but the last partition exactly the same size. I use partitions set up like this: Surfaces = 2 ; blockspertrack = 34 ; Reserved = 2 Interleave = 0 ; LowCyl – HighCyl = 1273 (for each partition) My objective in this is that with these parameters, I am able to do a DiskCopy between any of my partitions (except the last of course) and my GVP SyQuest removeable media drive. One of the HDs actually has 9 heads but again, SCSI doesn't care. Be extreamly careful when making the LowCyl and HighCyl calculations and entries…. it is very easy to attempt to use the same set of blocks for two different partitions…. note that you may not notice such an error until such time as you get close to filling one of the partitions or formatting one of them with data in the other (this is the voice of experience speaking). 73, bill
#4957From: George D. BrownOct 30, 1990 3:41 PM
Well, Dave, I just did the same thing (hooked up a Quantum 105S) to a A2090a. First of all Don Curtis gave me the necessary drive information to use: number of heads = 6, number of cylinders = 1709 and the number of sectors per track = 20. The SCSI section of the A2090a manual should explain how to use the PREP program on the Amiga 2000HD/2500 Reinstall Disk to set up the mountlist and partitions. If you need any help, let me know. George Brown 75016,3441