"kmcneill@dlogics.com" "Kevin J. McNeill"

>I know DEC was big on proprietary SCSI back when the 3100's were made.  =
>What type of SCSI disks will this boot off of.  I need at least enough =
>space to run VMS 7.2.  Model numbers or manufacturers are what I am =
>looking for.

Digital have never been big on proprietary SCSI. Back when VS3100s were new
SCSI was simply not tightly enough defined to be able to guarantee that any
drive would work. Over the years, SCSI has tightened up and the increasing
popularity of SCSI on PCs has driven disk manufacturers to improve
compatibility.

In addition OpenVMS engineering has made significant efforts to make the SCSI
drivers more tolerant of drives that do not behave exactly as you might expect.
The overall result has been that for a recent release of OpenVMS (say V7.1 or
V6.2) you can pick up a PC drive off the street and have a reasonable 
expectation of being able to boot from it.

There are two things to note however:

1. VAXstation 3100s (any flavour) cannot reliably boot from drives bigger
   than about 1.07GB - the console SCSI driver built into ROM uses 6 byte
   commands to talk to the drive. No firmware fix is available (not even
   internally for mission-critical machines, like the VS3100-76 on my desk :-)
   Data drives are fine (because by the the OS has booted).

2. Digital puts much time and effort testing SCSI drives with the VAX and
   Alpha machines it supports them on. This testing costs much time and money
   and (I am told) more often than not reveals deficiencies in drives under
   the kinds of conditions that do not necessarily occur in the typical
   PC (the environment these drives are targetted for). So be aware that
   you do get what you pay for. Whether its worth the extra cost of
   a Digital-approved drive depends on what you want it for. Quite frankly,
   if this is a machine to play with at home, my personal opinion is that
   as long as it looks like it works at all then you might as well not worry;
   if it's mission critical data and your job depends on it your perspective
   may well be slightly different.

And another thing (oops, that's three things - what have the Romans ever done
for us ...)

3. There is no OpenVMS V7.2 yet, not even in field-test. V7.1 has only just
   hit the streets in the last few months.

Antonio

All my personal opinion - don't read anything into any of this :-)