Thanks to Allan Rollow who let me know that any 433AUs from prior to March
1998 (mine is Dec 1997) have a hardware defect which causes data
corruption with multiple I/O intensive adapters (eg 2 SCSI cards). There
is a differential SCSI adapter available from Digital (KZPSA-BB) but
the driver may or may not actually have been tested.
Serguei Patchkovskii also mentioned the data corruption problem with
serial numbers lower than 810xxx which I am assuming means about March
1998.
Jim Kirk pointed me to www.intraserver.com who make a differentail scsi
adapter and provide a Digital Unix driver for it.
So, I would be OK if I got rid of my current SCSI card and replaced it
with either the Digital or Intraserver adapter.
I also discovered however that Digital also has a black box converter
(DWZZB-AA) which is cheaper than the adapter and obviously can be used on
multiple machines which is really helpful to me since I am testing all
kinds of OSes with an external differential scsi box.
However, I also needed this connectivity by next week and shipping time
from Digital was about 2 weeks. I finally tracked down a place, CS
Electronics (
http://www.scsi-cables.com) which could ship me a converter
overnight. This is the way I went in the end.
Thanks all for the help which came rolling in immediately.
-Steve
Received on Fri Oct 23 1998 - 13:56:18 NZDT