Very chatty SCSI bus

[Dennis Herrick]

Hi Folks:

We recently purchased a SCSI floppy drive for a special application.
Manufacturer is WinStation and the model number is WFS(2/3) E1W1. We have
it installed in a Kingston/StorCase DataSilo model DS100-S2MM. We used
a standard 6 foot SCSI HD50 cable and active terminator. Also installed
in the second bay of the DataSilo is a Plextor PX-W4012TS, which is a 40X
SCSI CD Writer. We use Adaptec 29160N SCSI cards and the DataSilo is
connected to the external port. CD Writer is SCSI ID 5 and the Floppy
drive is ID 3. I've tested without the CD Writer connected too and I've
tested it at SCSI ID 6 too.

I've tested the SCSI floppy under Windows XP and Windows NT. Under
NT the drive and SCSI bus appear fine. Under Windows XP the performance is
similar, however the floppy and SCSI bus activity light flashes weakly
once a second. Other than this the drive seems to work fine. I contacted
Winstation and their support folks and one of their hardware developers say
that they suspect "SCSI heartbeat". Don't confuse that with cluster heart-
beat. I'm testing Windows XP Pro and Windows NT Workstation, not a server
cluster with network heartbeat. This is on the SCSI bus. And WinStation
says that they haven't evaluated their SCSI floppy product with Windows
XP yet and they speculate that there is a Windows XP registry setting to
turn off "SCSI heartbeat". I've looked and I can't find anything like that
in the registry. I've looked at the Adaptec card configuration and nothing
appeared here as well. Has anyone heard of "SCSI heartbeat" and know of any
XP registry setting to turn it off? My next step is to buy a bus analyser to
see exactly what the communication is. However, it costs $1000 + and I may
not get approval for the purchase. WinStation says that is the only way to
really get at the problem.

Thanks,

Dennis Herrick
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Guest]

are there any other issues other than the weak once a minute light output of the activity led

if not....... you need a loooong vacation after the medical procedure to remove that stick

if no performance differences and you're only concern is the infrequent blinking just put some tape over the light for god's sake

you have gone into a lot of detail.... goo
provided tons of info..... also goo
are concerned over the most minor of details and have gone to great lengths to try to solve..... ba

you need to learn to relax a bit

 

[Chuck]

Is there any difference when a floppy is in the drive or removed?
Does the host system have "RAID" implemented?

 

[Dennis Herrick]

Hi Chuck:

When I put a floppy in the drive the light goes from weak
1 sec continuous flashes to steady green for about 10 seconds. An
Explorer window pops up, showing the contents of the floppy. Then,
after about 10 seconds the light goes out, no more weak flashes.
Is Windows XP simply polling the floppy drive looking for media
to access?

We are not running any form of RAID on the box, neither IDE,
SATA nor SCSI RAID.

We sell semiconductor process equipment to Japanese, Korean
and German companies along with others. These three nationalities
are "extremely" fussy about performance. Everything must be perfect
or they need to know in great detail what's going on. We're about to
ship our first system with a SCSI floppy to a customer and it's
going to one of the three countries mentioned.

Thanks for the quick reply,

Dennis

 

[Pavel]

I have heard of SCSI floppy drives but have never seen one. Why do you use
such drives? Anyway, my guess is that the SCSI controller it's self detects
that floppy was inserted and does it's own checks. This is how it works with
SCSI ZIP drives also. You can even test this by booting on the floppy with
out Windows and then remove/insert the floppy and see if it still flashes.
As far as Windows...since a separate driver is used for this type of floppy
it may or may not be polling the drive. On top of that, depending how the
Windows sees the floppy, it too, independent of the driver may be polling
the drive looking perhaps for Autorun files.