[Info-vax] SCSI issues on Alpha

[Scott Dorsey]

I've got a user who is a great fan of his  Alpha Personal Workstation 433a,
and I'd like to consolidate the disks on it and replace them with a newer
mirrored pair of disks.

Currently on the SCSI chain he has the internal RZ1CC-BA, and externally
he's got one Seagate ST1510N drive and two IBM DNES-318350W drive.  So the
mix of wide and narrow is a little weird.

Now, the only newer SCSI drives I have are Seagate ST3146807LC, since new
scsi drives are not a common thing.  I can put them either on an adaptor
to an 80-pin Honda connector or an adaptor to a 50-pin Centronics-style
connector, but in either case the buss becomes extremely flakey... when 
I am at the monitor rom and do a "sh dev d" everything disappears or 
large numbers of duplicate drives appear.

So... my first question is why is the "sh dev d" on this system so different
than on the Decstation machines?  It seems like it is caching something; it
does not do a buss reset every time I run the command.  What do I need to do
in order to get it to actually force a buss interrogation?

And the second question is... why is this happening?  Is there something 
about the ST3146807LC that is a problem?  The low voltage mode?  The 
differential mode?

I tried moving the whole external chain over to an Ultrasparc machine and 
everything works just fine there, I can't make the buss do anything odd.
So I am thinking it's something specific to the way the Alpha implements
it.

Is there some other large drive I should be trying here?  Am I missing
something important?
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."