[rescue] DVD Burner in an Ultra 10

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 04:42:10PM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote:
> You'd better tell that to the SCSI DVD burner I've got on my desk in Pudsey.
> 
> It's actually a Pioneer A07 with a SCSI-II SCSIDE converter and stuffed into
> a SCSI-II external drive case. Prices were #130, #30 and #25 respectively at
> the time I built it.
> 
> I've got this attached to an x86 Linux box with a cheap Adaptec SCSI card,
> and it's a lot more reliable than having the drive attached to the machine's
> "good" IDE controller.
> 
> The Pioneer A08 is now out and it's about #90. The only "problem" with the
> A08 is it's an 8X DVD writer which wants about 10MB/s, so it's not going to
> play nicely with SCSI-II. (Of course you could always go to fast and/or wide
> SCSI, but most of my kit is regular SCSI-II.)

OK.  Is your card a AEC-7720U?  If so, it should support 20MB/s when
connected to an ultra narrow controller.  But, perhaps you have some
older discontinued adapter.

10MB/s is fast (or wide, but from the context I think not) SCSI.
Fast-Wide is 20MB/s. Ultra-Narrow is 20MB/s.  Ultra-Wide is 40MB/s.
Etc.

One question I was hoping you could answer is what version of the
firmware do you have?  I believe it should be written on a sticker on a
small chip on the IDE side of the card.

I bought a Acard AEC-7720UW (which uses the same control chip as the
7720U), with firmware version 3.4, and so far I haven't been getting
favorable results.  Updating the firmware will be tricky (I have to use
a Windows machine with a SCSI card and properly set up ASPI drivers, and
I don't have such a machine, nor know anyone who does), so I'm thinking
of adjusting the drive I use with the card rather than try to update the
firmware. 

Of course, the fact that I'm trying to use this on an SGI may also be
relevent.  The cards are known to work with harddrives on SGIs, but I
haven't found any record of people trying them with CD or DVD devices on
SGIs.