[Info-vax] Nostalgia... formatting drives

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

David Hoelzer <dhoelzer at enclaveforensics.com> wrote:
> Well, a replacement NOS seagate 1gb 50 pin drive arrived today 
> to replace a failed shadow member.  After wrestling with the 
> Microvax 3100/90 console for a while I once again remembered how 
> to initialize a drive...
> 
> The other thing I had forgotten was exactly how long it takes 
> to format a 1 gig drive on one of these guys!!

Normally SCSI drives come already low-level formatted. 
You do need to initialize the file system, but that should
be fast.

You can low-level format to a different sector size.
I remember in the early days of SCSI that some used a slightly
longer, maybe 528 bytes, to include some ECC data. 

-- glen