Hi,
I've been asked to suss out a couple of mo drives for our tru64
workstations. We are looking at the 5.2gb Sony drives SMO-F551 or as they
are quoted in Australia RMOS551-DD. These devices have a scsi-2 interface
using CEN-50 connectors. Has anyone had any experience with these devices.
some questions:
(a) drivers for the mo devices, the re-seller seems to think that we should
be able to, out of the box, just connect these things to our workstations
and they will work in a similar fashion to connecting an external scsi hard
disk (ie once you have the device connected with a new disk inserted, you
could add the disklabel with disklabel and then put on a file system with
newfs or mkfset (perhaps there are even utilities to write cdfs, like gnu's
cdrecord)). My guess is that ufs is the more logical way to go, as the
optical disk will then not have any memory as to which machine it was last
connected to, however I'm not to sure that that is all that important.
There appears to be a number of available driver suites out there, that
promise to make the disk look just like a standard hard disk drive, but I'm
not quite sure that I couldn't get away with standard unix as the re-seller
has suggested.
(b) obviously mounting and unmounting disks may require super user
privileges, either by setting the suid bit on a executable (preferrably a
carefully constructed bit of C code), or having the super user mount and
unmount disks for the users. However a driver suite from one of the vendors
may include an executable that will do this for the common user.
(c) There are different media possibilities. Basically you can get disks
that have a low level format for different block sizes, namely 512bytes,
1024bytes and 2048bytes. It has been suggested that the correct media is
512byte block sizes. Here again I'm unsure, I would have thought that tru64
might be storing things in larger blocks then 512. I thought that bsd had
something called the berkley fast file system where to get disk access speed
up, the block sizes were increased from the original 512bytes, and there was
software to take the blocks and split then into 512 chunks so that the
operating system could access the stuff.
(d) anyother gotchas, I haven't mentioned.
Dennis
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Dennis Macdonell
Systems Administrator
email: mcdonell_at_auslig.gov.au
ph: 61 2 6201 4326
fax: 61 2 6201 4377
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Received on Fri Jul 14 2000 - 18:34:00 NZST