Tip for Bernoulli drive users...

[Chuck(G)]

I've got a job coming up to handle a bunch of 90MB Bernoulli cartridges, so I hauled my dual-drive unit off the shelf and set it up. Took a spare (blank) cartridge and inserted it in both drives. The unit spun up in both cases, making an awful racket and registered numerous read errors. I ran the drive for about half hour and eventually the noise vanished. Thinking the worst, that I may have crapped out my drive heads and destroyed the disk, I was pleasantly surprised that the disk was fine and when re-inserted in either drive, could be read just fine. I confess that I hadn't operated that drive in over 20 years, so the noise was probably gunk working its way out.

On a related note, I tried running the drive (internal termination turned off) on an Adaptec AHA29160 SCSI controller. If I put a terminator (active or passive, the result was the same) the BIOS complained about "too many devices on the SE connection". If I left the terminator off, the BIOS complained about "SCSI cable not terminated). If I try the same exercise on a 2940, 3940 or 2920, no problems with the terminator. Has anyone else seen this? I confess that running a SE SCSI II device on a 29160 is a little silly, but it's supposed to be compatible.

 

[jlang]

Check if the 29160 is providing term power.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I'll do that.

 

[Wildfire]

Did you try different terminators ?
Sometimes one may be not ok.
For myself i do not trust integrated terminators when it comes to controllers or drives, always use external ones.
And one may also check the settings in the controller firmware, you should be able to at least change the used IDs to SingleEnded there;
i remember once having had some trouble which was gone after settings changed to 8-bit operation...
HTH

 

[Chuck(G)]

Tried both active and passive terminators (I've got a bucket of them). Since there's a HD50 connector on the back of the card, I'm assuming that SE 8 bit functionality is included.

 

[Wildfire]

I know, but it still can be that in the firmware settings are 16 -bit; this is not auto configured...
My problem was solved after manually changing the setting to 8-bit, eventually it also makes sense to try Fast-Scsi or even asynchronous as setting ( idk what speed the Bernoulli drive has, i assume Fast-Scsi not Ultra-Scsi speed )
I used not only the 29160 with different types of drives / tapes and all worked without problems after the config setting had been adjusted to the right settings.
Ok, there may still be a chance of a flakey controller...

 

[Chuck(G)]

The 29320 in a different system behaves similarly. No problems with 2940/3940/2920 however, so I'm not up a stump in any case.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I'm wondering if I have an old copy of the Bernoulli firmware. The drive FW identifies as "BETA90"--is this usual? My drives were sent to me by Iomega for evaluation, no return needed.

 

[NeXT]

I've seen that before. Back when LGR was like the rest of us in terms of production quality he had a 230mb Bernoulli that identified as "BETA230"
Source:

Edited: "playback on other websites has been disabled by the video owner"? Come on Clint. We know you are better than that. :U

Anyways, it's been a while since I watched in full but I recall he was having weird drive issues both within Windows and within the Adaptec SCSI utility which I always assumed was bugs from using an early firmware build.

 

[Wildfire]

This is your only drive you have ?
If i remember it correctly higher ones as f.e. the 230 should be backwards compatible.
Hmm, idk but eventually i find my drive(s) and can test this here...
The BETAxxx identification maybe normal, i read it also once during some testing here.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I've got Bernoulli drives going back to the early 5.25" 10 MB ones. I'm a firm believer in first using the drive the media was designed for--and my 90MB drives are a pair. The job involves recovering files from 90 MB media.

 

[bear]

They're known as beta drives, yes, it's a product family designation, not a production development status.

Chuck, I can't say I've encountered a 29160 with an 8-bit external connector, but your Adaptec may need to be explicitly configured to internally terminate only the high byte. I'm not sure the "automatic termination" setting will do that, and it may also depend on what else is on the internal (presumably 16-bit?) bus. If you have one of the models that has two internal connectors (a 16-bit and an 8-bit one) and it isn't a dual-channel model, you can't use all three connectors (the external and both internals) at once -- only a maximum of two.

 

[Unknown_K]

You can stick an 8 bit SCSI device on a 16bit wide controller using adapters but terminating the drive can be tricky. I had a device with the funky old CN50 connected to a LVD 68 pin card years ago using adapters and it worked fine. SE drives need SE termination and as long as the SCSI card is labeled SE/LVD you should be fine.

 

[Chuck(G)]

The 29160 has a HD50 SE connector on the rear bracket. I did find the solution to the conundrum, however.
Since I'm not trying to boot from the drive, I place it at a higher ID (5) which disables wide transfers until the target requests them.

The solution was to change SE termination in the menu from "Automatic" to "Enabled". I suspect with the target supplying termpower, that "Disabled" would work as well. It's the "Auto" termination that seems to be confusing the firmware.

Tried it with a number of older SCSI devices (Bernoulli drive, Syquest 44MB drive, Iomega Jaz, CDROM, etc.) No issues.