Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sm.unisys.com!ism780c!tim
From: tim@ism780c.isc.com (T.W."Tim" Smith, Knowledgian)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: LaCie Cirrus Hard Disks - mini review
Message-ID: <13827@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 17 Aug 88 20:02:48 GMT
References: <5127@husc6.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: tim@ism780c.UUCP (T.W."Tim" Smith, Knowledgian)
Organization: Suction and Pressure Lab, California Institute of Lawsonomy
Lines: 38


I am not unbiased on this, having written a disk driver and installer
program for a competitor of LaCie, but here are my observations.

As part of doing mine, I got to look at a large number of the other
installers/drivers that are out there.  First observations:  Have you
ever noticed that no two installers use the same user interface?  Some
are menu driven, some are modal dialogs, some are modeless dialogs.
The LaCie one was without a doubt the niftiest one to play with.

Second observation:  Everyone's driver except Apple's is pretty much the
same.  LaCie's was the most different of the "everybody is the same"
group, with the ability to select how it transfers data.  But if you
Nosy almost everybodies driver, you will see the same sort of things.
Except for Apple's, which look's completely different.  It looks like
Apple are the only people who did not use the sample SCSI driver from
Apple as a basis for their code!

Third observation: An occasional crash from an installer program is
"normal", if one is doing strange things to the disk.

Fourth observation: the one called HDD Install is the most useful when
one is developing a driver/installer.  This one has a menu that let's
you select and execute SCSI commands!  This is really neat!  I found that
better then SCSI Tool for what I was doing.

Fifth observation: Real SCSI vs. Fake SCSI.  There are several drives
that use ST-506 disks with a SCSI to ST-506 card.  These cards often
require special setup, and are missing various important SCSI commands,
such as INQUIRY.  Some installers will not support them.  If you are thinking
of obtaining some random installer and trying to make ones own disk,
either make sure your disk is real SCSI, or that the installer you get
knows about the card your disk is using.
-- 
Tim Smith					Phone: 408-257-8844
Ballard Synergy Corp.				Compuserve: 72257,3706
10601 S. DeAnza #212				AppleLink: D1676
Cupertino, Ca, 95014				GEnie: mnementh