Subject: Quirky SCSI drives
To: None <current-users@NetBSD.ORG>
From: John F. Woods <jfw@jfwhome.funhouse.com>
List: current-users
Date: 03/02/1996 23:22:42
Speaking of the SCSI drive quirks table, I happen to have both a
quirky tape drive (who's the right person to tell of these?  Or is
send-pr the right path?), and a question.  The tape drive is a CIPHER
ST150S2/90 rev 2.2Q drive (QIC-150, pretty old and no doubt out of
production), and the question is:

What modern drives actually DO respond usefully to nonzero SCSI
logical units?  (I happen to have an OMTI-20D SASI adapter which would
handle two ST-506 disks and a QIC-02 tape drive (and I think a floppy,
but I don't remember) on separate LUNs, but I thought that most modern
SCSI equipment was all gadgets with builtin controllers that only
respond to LUN 0 (at best ;-).  While I suppose a RAID array might
usefully assign the nonzero LUNs to individual component drives (at
least for arrays of less than 7 disks), I don't know of any other
really obvious uses in modern equipment for multiple LUNs.

Perhaps "does something useful with LUNs" ought to be the ``quirk'',
rather than "screws up on LUNs"?  While it's sad to ``marginalize'' a
properly-designed drive, this would certainly reduce the frequency
with which that table has to be updated...