I recently inquired whether there are any "gotchas" in mixing drives
of different geometries on a xy451, xy7053, or isp80 disk controller.
The general consensus was that this usually works, but two potential
problem areas were identified:
1) If mixing drive types on a xy451, make sure the "magic cookie"
drive_type is different for the disks you are formatting on
each controller. Otherwise, you won't be able to get at all the
drives on each controller, from the format program. (If you have
to change drive_type, this forces a re-format because drive_type
is stored on the disk.)
2) One correspondent mentioned that he has observed some SMD drives will
interfere with other when cabled together on the same controller.
He doesn't know why, but just knows he has definitely observed
this happening, probably caused by certain manufacturers not
observing proper grounding or terminating conventions on the control
cable. However, he seemed sure drives from the same manufacturer
don't have this problem.
These successes in mixing drives were reported:
1) Four correspondents either said, or implied, that they are mixing
drives on a xy451.
2) Two correspondents said they were mixing 1.2G and 2.5G Sabre
drives and/or using both 3MB/sec and 6MB/sec (dualhead) Sabre
drives on a isp80 controller.
3) Three correspondents reported success in mixing drive types on
a xy7053 controller. Two specifically mentioned mixing Hitachi
DK815 and Sabre 9720-* drives.
Thanks to the following persons for taking the time to reply:
dan@breeze.bellcore.com (Daniel Strick)
dupuy@hudson.cs.columbia.edu (Alexander Dupuy)
fwp1@Ra.MsState.Edu (Frank Peters)
randy@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (Rand S. Huntzinger)
ekrell@ulysses.att.com
Sandy Napel <snapel@irus.rri.uwo.ca>
Alastair Young <alastair@eucad.co.uk>
"Manavendra K. Thakur" <thakur@zerkalo.harvard.edu>
"Anthony A. Datri" <datri@lovecraft.convex.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:12 CDT