SCSI DataFast D-106

List Price: $3895.00

Q: I know that my SCSI drives are good but yet the duplication fails on the D106. What should I do?

A: Experience shows that in most cases copy problems with the D106 are related to cables and cable adapters. Greystone recommends changing the cable on the failing drive with a cable from another drive position that is known to be good.

Also, carefully inspect the plugging of any 68 pin to 50 pin adapter blocks you are using. It is possible that the 50 pin connector end of these blocks is plugged into the drive such that there is an offset either to the left or right by one row of pins.

Q: Do the SCSI drives have to be jumpered to a particular SCSI address?

A: No. The D106 provides a separate SCSI bus for the master drive and for each of the four target drives. Therefore, the jumpered address for each drive may be any address independent of the address of any other drive.

Q: Do the SCSI drives have to be terminated?

A: Greystone recommends that the source and each target drive be terminated. However, since there is only one drive on the SCSI bus, non-terminated drives will generally work.

Q: When running the duplication process I get a failure when the copy is 99% or 100% complete. What is causing this?

A: This problem has been observed when one or more pins in the cable to the drive is not making good contact. The failure is caused because the capacity of the drive is not obtained correctly at the beginning of the copy operation. This results later in the addresses of the block being copied exceeding the capacity of the drive.

When connections are erratic, the D106 may receive the wrong capacity from the drive by some small amount that is a power of two - such as 8 or 16 or 32 blocks. For example, the D106 may think that the drive has a capacity of 4,094,328 blocks when the actual capacity is 4,094,320 blocks.

Cable connection problems will also cause failures during the optional verification step. However, in some cases the failure at 99% during the copy step will be the first point of failure.

Q: Does the D106 support the copying of drives having the low-voltage-differential (LVD) interface.

A: Yes. The following configurations have been tested by Greystone and are recommended:

LVD SCSI drives with the 68 pin "wide" connector
Greystone recommends using standard 68 pin SCSI cables, which are between 4" and 10" in length. These cables should have a 68 pin connector on each end with no additional cable connectors along the length of the cable.

The drives are operated in single ended mode. LVD drives will automatically detect that the drive is operating single ended and adjust its buss drivers/receivers accordingly. Some LVD drives also have a jumper option "SE" or "Enable single ended mode". Greystone’s tests have demonstrated that copying operations are successful with LVD drives (working in single ended mode) regardless of whether the "SE" jumper is connected or not connected.

There is no provision on an LVD drive for termination of the SCSI buss. Strictly speaking, all SCSI busses must be terminated. However, in the D106 case where there is only one drive on the SCSI buss and the maximum cable length is restricted to 10" or less it has been found that copy operations are robust even without termination.

LVD SCSI drives with the 80 pin "SCA" connector
The configurations described for 68 pin LVD drives are applicable with the additional requirement that it will be necessary to use an adapter to allow the 68 pin cable to plug into the 80 pin drive connector. Power to the drive is supplied using a standard 4 pin Molex connector which is plugged into the adapter. The required adapter is the Greystone F-ADP-SCA-LVD.