[HECnet] Drives for a VAX-11/730

[Clem Cole]

It been a long time, so I just don't remember if they worked out the box or not on VMS.    We mostly ran UNIX on Vaxen in those days, but did have a couple of VMS boxes and frankly I've forgotten which things needed special drivers and which did not.   I remember that for some of the HW we had, we had to add patches/drivers.

But what I was pointing out is that Unibus to SCSI is very possible (although might be pricey ;-) But I have to believe the SW to support it should be reasonable easy to find if it does not work out of the box.

If you have SCSI, you should be able to find storage to attach that would be reasonably cheap, reliable and maintainable.

Clem

As a side note: Just last week, I spliced a PCI/SCSI to a fairly modern INTEL*64 (*BSD UNIX) system, so we could retrieve some data from some 25 year old QIC tapes and were successful at recovering some historical stuff from the old days.    We had one HW failure which I did was lucky to have a second drive, and of the 5 tapes brought to me, we had 2 media failures on one tape (which we got around and lost only two small files) and two tapes, I had to replace the rubber bands on from two new tapes I had, but once done - we recovered those tapes 100%


On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 11:43 AM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:

On Jul 15, 2013, at 11:17 AM, Bob Armstrong wrote:

>> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/cmd/CDU-720_May92.pdf
>> These are available on eBay for about a $1K last I looked.
>
>   Eeek!
>
>> You'll need to poke around the VMS web sites for the drivers
>
>   Looks like it does MSCP - I don't know why you'd need special drivers
> unless maybe to support non-standard sized drives.

That shouldn't matter either.   MSCP gets the device size from the device; one of the big points of MSCP is to do logical block addressing and leave geometry as a device detail.   I'd be surprised if VMS got this wrong...

            paul