[SunRescue] HiTechCafe 9GB SGI branded IBM DGHS-09Y disks

[Stephen Dowdy]

There's been a bit of discussion on these drives here, so i thought i'd
poke on y'all.  I bought several of them and in both the SS20 and the
Ultra1/170 i have tried them in, they occasionally Abort requiring a reset
(non-fatal condition).  I think this is due to a CMD Tag Queuing problem.

I grabbed the IBM "FLASHDRV" CDROM ISO and figured out which .BIN was for
the DGHS-09Y and overwrote the SGI firmware (SGI IBM DG 0190) with the
IBM Retail version (IBMPCCO DGHS09Y 04F0).  I ran 8 passes in format's
analyze/read w/o an abort, but then it started doing it again on the
9th pass. (it did this for passes 9-12, but not on the rest of the 20
passes, which is better than with the SGI firmware, i think) In format, it
reports:

	Recoverable error during read
	ASC: 0xb   ASCQ: 0x1

I *think* the "0xb" is an "Abort" operation.  When dumping files to the
newfs'd partition, the error is reported as:

scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING:
  /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/espdma at f,400000/esp at f,800000 (esp0):
  Disconnected tagged cmds (1) timeout for Target 1.0
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING:
  /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/espdma at f,400000/esp at f,800000/sd at 1,0 (sd1):
  SCSI transport failed: reason 'timeout': retrying command

I do have all the docs on using /etc/system and {esp,fas}.conf to disable TQ
system-wide, ctrlr-wide, or on a TargetID/Vendor-Inquiry string, but before
i do this, i'm wondering if anyone else has bought these drives, had the
same issues (or not), and discovered a different solution to this problem.

Thanks,
--stephen
--
Stephen Dowdy - Systems Administrator - CS Dept - Univ of Colorado at Boulder
dowdy at cs.colorado.edu  --  http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~dowdy/signature.html