Hmm... in my original complaint, I mentioned getting info from Brian
Powell that he was having problems with a HP drive. I thought the
complaint came thru Sun Managers, but it appears not -- several other
folk say they've never seen his note. So I'll copy him on this summary
and tell him about Sun-Managers.
There were some contradictions in what was reported to me, but on the
whole the answers were encouraging. Everyone said the exact firmware
level was very important. Dan Butzer <hela!cis.ohio-state.edu!butzer>
was the most specific:
>The drives work VERY VERY well with SS2's provided you have correct firmware.
>
>Your drive should have C103 level firmware or later. B level firmware
>wont work. Talk to whomever sold you the drive about getting an upgrade.
>
>You can determine the firmware level by doing a "probe-scsi" from the
>OK prompt of the open boot prom. The last 4 digits displayed reveal the
>firmware level.
He also gave this additional reason to upgrade the firmware:
>Also, with C103, the drives go synchronous at 4MB/s (not 3.?????)
Guntram Wolski (gwolsk@sei.com) wrote:
>We have some PROM upgrades and plan on trying the configuration in a few
>weeks when we get our second HP drive. If you have no answer by then,
>I will let you know. butzer@pinnacle.com told me he had no problems
>getting it to work with the new PROMS. They sit on a little plug in
>module, and the latest PROMS I received from my vendor have an i.d.
>tag of C2DFU/C103 on them.
John Posey <hela!utdallas.edu!posey> wrote:
>We are using three HP-97549T disks (1.18G) successfully on two SS2s.
>I suspect that you need a firmware change on the disk. Contact your
>distributor and have them contact HP or contact HP directly and ask
>about getting your firmware changed to SCSI-2 that is compatible with
>SPARCs.
The 97548S and 97549T are supposed to be identical except for
capacity (8=660MB, 9=1180MB), and firmware level (T>S). So this
is encouraging.
Bob Drzyzgula (rcd@fed.frb.gov) writes (I've excerpted):
> . . . we just got one of those beasts to run on a SPARCstation
>2 just a few days ago. When we first hooked it up a couple of weeks
>ago, it was nightmare city. All you had to do was reboot the machine to
>cause serious and pervasive file corruption. Simple things like file
>copies would cause system crashes and lost data. After going through a
>rather stubborn denial phase, the vendor finally checked it out
>and came up with a ROM "coupon board" of all things. Seems like the ROM
>code in the drive just didn't get along with the SS2. We've got another
>97548 drive that hasn't been installed yet, but they're short on those
>ROMs: I guess that it's been an unexpectedly popular product :-).
>Anyway, the system can now be rebooted without losing half the disk. I
>can't say yet if it's gonna stay problem free for the long haul.
>
>FYI, we also had to get ROM upgrades for some 1.2GB HP 97549T drives in
>order to get them to work on the SS2. For the time being, I'm gonna
>stay away from HP drives. I've never had a problem with Seagate/Imprimis
>drives...
Heh heh. If anybody from HP is on this list, I'm sure they loved his
last paragraph.
Thanks to all, and I'll write that check now...
Steve Simmons
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:12 CDT