Is "The Kid" related to Iggy

Karl Townsend · 2013-06-11T22:35:36+00:00

My son just got a free 15" southbend from grandpa just for coming to visit. Dad tossed in a 12" bench grinder, and a small pickup load of tools, and a real nice monster wench. No small trip - MN to NM - 2K miles. Then "The Kid" just won this auction Now he's surfing fleabay for a couple VFDs. Karl

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DoN. Nichols 13 years ago

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And this is FC-AL. It accepts the SCSI commands (so does IDE, for the most part), but the hardware part of the interface is quite different.

It has only two wires of input, and two of output, both differential. It looks for its address on the data flowing through, and if it is not for it, it lets it flow through to the next drive, for up to 126 drives total in the chain. And it is faster than the fastest SCSI.

Original SCSI was a 50-pin connector, with an 8-bit wide bidirectional data path, and a few handshaking signals, plus a matching ground for each data wire.

Wide SCSI is a 68-pin connector, and 16 data bits, but otherwise pretty much the same. Except that it may also be HVD (High Voltge Differential) or LVD (Low Voltage Differential). The latter can have the plain (single-ended) drives connected and it will work, but it slows down a bit. :-)

Then there is the SCA (Single Connector Access) which has an

80-pin wide connector, which gets the wide SCSI data though some of those pins, the +5V and +12V power, and four wires to specify which SCSI ID the drive will answer to. (It is determined by which socket it is plugged into when there are multiple drives in a housing.) It is a hot-swappable interface, unlike the others. The power pins make last or break first when plugging in or unplugging.

The FC-AL is like the SCA, except that it is only a 40-pin connector, and has seven wires to specify the SCSI address. Also hot-swappable.

O.K. I actually have a Windows 2000 system, and the install media for it. All I need is the right card to allow it to talk to the drives. :-) It's not like I'm using that system for anything else. :-)

Hmm ... At work, I was part of the SysAdmin team, and at home I own all the Sun machines (purchased at hamfest and eBay prices -- certainly not new. :-)

I had already been playing with Sun workstations and servers at home when they started that SysAdmin team. I'm retired now, so it is all my machines (well ... except for the one which my wife uses. :-)

Thanks, DoN.

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DoN. Nichols 13 years ago

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A very good page. Thanks. I did learn things, some of which should have been obvious, but I had not considered them.

Ouch! Linux 10.54, and I'm running 6.6.?, which appears to be the last version to escape for the UltraSPARC 64-bit CPUs. This means that I have to get a PCI interface FC-AL card to talk to the drives with something newer.

But then, I'm not sure that a benchmark program would be much help, anyway.

Thanks, DoN.

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Jim Wilkins 13 years ago

A graph of read speed is the best free quick test I've found to determine the quality of used hard drives, or sample CDs and DVDs before buying a big spindle. Any problem slows it down; it's like a Check Engine light. I save the initial graphs to check for deterioration later.

Rubtsov's HDD Scan program goes further and records the access time and block number if it's over 50mS. That's good for serious repair such as partitioning around a crash site, but the simpler HDTune type is easier to use otherwise. jsw

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DoN. Nichols 13 years ago

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The trick is "never switch the output side of a VFD while it is powering a motor. If it is halted, you can swithc over to another motors before spinning it up again. (What you need is an interlock so the VFD has to be at "halt" before you can switch to a new motor.) But two VFDS are nicer, anyway.

Enjoy, DoN.

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