🚀 go-pugleaf

	To: dekleer@parc.xerox.com
	Cc: cstacy@BBN.COM, slug@Sunset.AI.SRI.COM, jjd@bbn.com
	Subject: Re: XL1200 disks 
	Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 17:52:53 EDT
	From: James J Dempsey <jjd@bbn.com>
	
	> From: dekleer@parc.xerox.com
	>
	> I've had no problems with Seagate's ST32550N which are 2Gig.  Mounting
	> is always a jury rigged operation inside of the XL1200.  Anyone have
	> some real elegant solutions to this?
	
	This is a little off topic, but I thought I would report that we have
	been having enormous problems with the ST32550N 2GB 3.5" half height
	Seagate Barracuda-2.  We have been using them on a hundred or so PCs
	and UNIX machines.  They are less than six months old and they have
	been dying at the rate of several per week.  They die in a fashion
	that they are no longer visible on the SCSI bus and unresponsive to
	commands.  We are currently trying to replace all of them with
	Quantums, but they are dying as quickly as we can replace them.  We
	have lost untold amounts of time and money and some data dealing with
	this problem.
	
	Mr. Dekleer seems to be happy with his.  Perhaps we just got a bad
	batch, but it has left such a sour taste in my mouth that it will be a
	long time before I buy from Seagate.
	
			--Jim Dempsey--
			jjd@bbn.com
	
	
Funny you should mention these disks.  1 minute before I read this msg,
my system admin was talking about trying to debug what is happening with
our 4 ST32550N disks.  Seems our Sun Sparc-2's won't boot off of them (as
they do with other disks) on power-up.  In order for them to answer the
Sun, you first have to manually do a PROBE-SCSI (which they answer).  Then
you can boot, but when you do, they spew out a lot of diagnostics and
the Sun reports going to a slow SCSI mode talking to that disk:

esp0: data transfer overrun
State=DATA Last State=DATA_DONE
Latched stat=0x11<XZERO,IO> intr=0x10<BUS> fifo 0x6f
last msg out: <unknown msg 0xff>; last msg in: IDENTIFY
... more detailed diagnostic info from the disk...
esp0: Target 1.0 reducing sync. transfer rate
Reverting to slow SCSI cable mode
  SCSI transport failed: reason 'data_ovr': retrying command
 Error for command 'read'
 Error Level: Retryable
 Block 16, Absolute Block: 0
 Sense Key: Not Ready
 Vendor 'SEAGATE' error code: 0x4


I have that same sour taste....
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