🚀 go-pugleaf

There's something about the A2090A that I haven't seen mentioned
anywhere, but is very important to anyone considering buying one.

According to the A2090A addendum sheet, Seagate SCSI drives will not
autoboot with the A2090A "because of the long initialization process in
the Seagate power-up sequence".

I've seen the Seagate SCSI drives getting quite a bit of attention here,
and figured that this little detail deserves a little notice so people
don't buy incompatible parts when putting together a hard drive system.


On another subject, has the 8 head ST506 limit been fixed on the A2090A?
I saw several postings that implied that it had been fixed, but nothing
definite. This is of some importance to me since I just found a great
deal on 9 head 80 meg drive. The Prep command didn't complain when I
tried a vaule of 9 for the number of heads. Is this a good sign, or is
Prep a fairly dumb program? (I didn't actually carry through with the
prep since I don't have the drive yet.)



The A2090A does come with two autoboot ROMs, so as soon as my 1.3 ROM
shows up, I'll be in autoboot heaven. The manual says NOT to install
them unless you have 1.3. That's perfectly understandable, and its nice
to have the boot ROMs sitting right here ready to go, instead of the
RSN promises that are shipping with several other controllers.

Other trivial details I haven't seen mentioned anywhere: There's a
pair of pins on the board that the A2000's Hard Disk LED can be attached
to, so that any drive activity will be shown, even if you have multiple
drives. Also the 2 possible ST506 drives are DH0: and DH1:. If you have
a SCSI drive it is DH2: even if it's the only drive in the system. If
you're trying to store the Library of Congress, and need lots of drives,
you can have DH0: to DH8: on the first card, DI0: to DI8: on the second,
and on up through DJ and so on. 
-- 
Blaine Gardner @ Evans & Sutherland    580 Arapeen Drive, SLC, Utah 84108
Here: utah-cs!esunix!blgardne   {ucbvax,allegra,decvax}!decwrl!esunix!blgardne
There: uunet!iconsys!caeco!pedro!worsel!blaine
"Nobody will ever need more than 64K."    "Nobody needs multitasking on a PC."