[HPADM] Has anyone successfully used an Iomega 1 gig Jaz drive on an HP9000?
I received a bunch of responses (reprinted below), and now have 2 years of experience on my own. Short answer: YES.
I've got 712/60's, 9000/710's and C180's. Running hpux v9.01 .03 .05 and 10.20.
I've also got a flurry of elder VaxStations and a new AlphaStation, running
ancient (v5.5-2) and modern (v7.1-1H2) versions of OpenVMS.
Like Tom (see below), I've provided user-accessible mount/umount scripts.
The users love them. They're great fat-from-fire solutions when a main disk partition fills... a quick copy to the Jaz, and we're off and rolling again.
I'm also using them on Digital VAXstation 3200s with non-DEC scsi controllers (CMD 220's) under VMS v4.7. Performing a MOUNT/REBUILD (or accidently performing one by failing to specify /norebuild) will hang the entire VAXstation and require (or cause) a reboot. INITializing the drive under VMS works without problem. They will -not- work with DEC's built-in scsi adapters on my VAXstation 3100s and an Alpha 3000/400.
Two-year (11/98) update: I am now successfully hanging Jaz drives on an
AlphaStation
433au running OpenVMS... i simply use a 68-to-50 pin cable to attach the
Jaz to the workstation's FWSE UltraScsi external connector. I have also
simultaneously attached an Exabyte 8505H and a new Exabyte 8700LT.
The total load on the scsi bus is: original DEC (Quantum Atlas II) 4 gig
boot drive (scsi 0), new Quantum Atlas III 18 gig (scsi 1), original
DEC-supplied CDrom (scsi 4), external Jaz (scsi 2), external Exabyte (scsi 5).
Operating system: OpenVMS v7.2. Host: Alphastation 433au 433-MHz Alpha.
Now, back to the Sept 1996 response to my query:
From: SMTP%"Tom_Coates@Trimble.COM" 20-SEP-1996 12:42:24.82
Dick-
I did the research several months back and posted directions for both JAZ and ZIP drives to a model 712. Assuming you have standard scsi ports on your other devices I would expect those to work as well. I've attached a copy of the writeups.
I use the JAZ on my home 712 for backups, and the ZIP for general quick backups and transporting of stuff when networks aren't available. The ZIP also works great porting stuff from the MAE (Macintosh emulation on hpux) to a real MAC. We just installed a ZIP drive on a system here at work and people are now using it to archive things up to 100MB.
Regards,
Tom Coates :::/
tom_coates@trimble.com
My original query was whether anyone had successfully connected an Iomega ZIP or JAZ drive to an HP712 workstation. I didn't get responses from anyone who had directly done this, although there were some people who had connected other Apple peripherals. However, no one said it couldn't be done, and several people ask for details if I succeeded. One kind soul offered to try a Zip on their system in parallel with my efforts.
Well, it can be done. At least I've succeeded with a ZIP drive. For those interested I've attached a longwinded explanation of the process and results. I've purchased a JAZ drive and will be trying that out shortly. I hope that I won't be violating the purpose of the hpux-admin list by posting this info and the later results. I'll also forward them to Iomega. Perhaps they can include them on their web page.
The Iomega ZIP product is a removable storage disk drive, similar to a floppy drive, but with almost 100Mbyte per cartridge capacity. They are popular as primary and backup devices for Mac and PC platforms. Drives cost approximately US$200. Disks are about US$18.
The Macintosh versions of these disks have a SCSI interface. The PC versions connect to a PC parallel port and probably can't be made to work with HPUX. The SCSI drives can only operate as scsi device 5 or 6, but 6 is usually the internal disk, so only 5 is left. The switchable internal scsi termination on the Zip drive worked fine.
I initially had problems with basic scsi compatibility but this ended up being a bad cable. A 712 has a SCSI-II connector. The Zip drive has an "Apple-Scsi" 25-pin D connector. Adapter cables were available at my local computer shop (Fry's). Don't know if the cheap cable I bought was defective or just too cheap. Swapping it out fixed all my initial problems.
One warning: if you hook this up to a running HPUX system, you run the risk of triggering a re-boot. Everyone recommends that you power down any system before connecting or dis-connecting peripherals using SCSI. That was asking a bit much when I was trying to work out cable problems and I did a few "hot connects". Usually this worked okay. My best luck was to plug the unpowered Zip drive to the Scsi and then plug in its power cable. Almost never rebooted.
All of the following commands were done as root, unless otherwise noted.
The scsiinfo command (not an hp standard; something I picked up somewhere) had no trouble coming up with the device characteristics. With no disk inserted I got the following:
ID 5: Vendor: IOMEGA
Product: ZIP 100
Revision: N*32
Vendor specific: 06/05/95
Device type: disk
ANSI level 2
ISO level 0
SCSI-2 Response
Inserting a 100MB cartridge changed this to:
ID 5: Vendor: IOMEGA
Product: ZIP 100
Revision: N*32
Vendor specific: 06/05/95
Device type: disk
ANSI level 2
ISO level 0
SCSI-2 Response
Block length: 512
Number of blocks: 196608
I used the "newdisk" command (available from PHCO_5881 patch) to
create disktab entries. This added the following entries to my
/etc/disktab:
IOMEGA_ZIP|IOMEGA_ZIP_noswap|IOMEGA_ZIP_noreserve:\
:No swap or boot:ns#16:nt#8:nc#768:\
:s0#98304:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
IOMEGA_ZIP_40MB:\
:40 MB swap:ns#16:nt#8:nc#448:\
:s0#57344:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
(I manually moved the label "IOMEGA_ZIP" from the 40MB swap
entry to the no_swap entry, so that noswap became the default.)
Sam still couldn't handle adding the disk by itself. Not sure exactly why, but Sam has always had trouble for me with new disks, unless several configuration files are setup just right. Not worth it for me to figure this out, so I manually created a file system with:
/etc/newfs -L -n -v -i 8192 -m 0 /dev/rdsk/c201d5s0 IOMEGA_ZIP
"-i 8192" gave a few extra megabytes by reducing the maximum
number of files the disk could hold. About 10000 files
with this setting.
"-m 0" gives no "minfree" amount, which allows me to fill the
disk completely. The performance penalties for almost full
disk weren't so important to me on this type of storage, so
I optimized for maximum capacity.
"-n" no bootstrap programs
"-L" Use long file names
"-v" verbose mode
Formatting only took a few seconds. I was then able to mount the
disk with:
mkdir /zip
/etc/mount /dev/dsk/c201d5s0 /zip
The device files /dev/dsk/c201d5s0 and /dev/rdsk/c201d5s0 were
already present on my system. They looked just like the entries
for my builtin scsi disk at address 6.
Once all this was done, I had a disk with about 96MB of storage. I copied a large amount of stuff as a test. Not super fast, but not nearly as slow as a normal floppy. A test transfer with
time cp -R /etc /zip
(about 20 Mbytes of stuff) took just over 3 minutes.
Everything looks just like a normally mounted Scsi disk. One
nice feature is that the drive "captures" the disk when mounted,
and won't let you eject it until it is unmounted. Prevents file
system corruption due to unflushed buffers.
I created a few scripts that ran with suid root privileges for the allow general users to format, mount, and unmount ZIP disks.
mountzip:
---s--x--x 1 root sys /usr/local/bin/mountzip
#! /bin/ksh
/etc/mount /dev/dsk/c201d5s0 /zip
umountzip:
---s--x--x 1 root sys /usr/local/bin/umountzip
#! /bin/ksh
/etc/umount /dev/dsk/c201d5s0 /zip
formatzip:
---s--x--x 1 root sys /usr/local/bin/formatzip
#! /bin/sh
/etc/newfs -L -n -v -i 8192 -m 0 /dev/rdsk/c201d5s0 IOMEGA_ZIP
ZIP WITH MACINTOSH APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT (MAE)
I tried running the zip drive from Apple's MAE Macintosh Emulation Environment. (This opens a window that can directly run virtually any Macintosh application.) Amazingly, this worked perfectly. It required only a tiny amount of configuration to get going: adding the disk to list of MAE mountable disks; and making the device file read/write. I could read and write a disk that had been formatted and written by a Macintosh. I was able to completely transfer several applications from a Mac to the MAE emulator, and everything worked beautifully. I was even able to run the applications direct from the ZIP disk. Using the system in this mode does not use normal Unix mounts, but it does require you to tell the MAE system to mount the disk. MAE is able to format the disks (as was the Real-Mac).
As a mechanism to transfer data between Real-Macs and MAE, this is a wonderul choice. Only a network would be better.
ZIP WITH DOSIF UTILITIES
I tried the dosif utilities that work well (though sluggishly) with the normal 1.44MB HP floppy drives. (These utilities allow floppies formatted for DOS-PCs to be read and written from HPUX.) Although I had a DOS formatted disk, the dosif commands (dosls, etc.) failed to work. It may be that they will ONLY work with HP's floppy driver, and can't function through the scsi port. I also tried running the disk using HP's WABI (MS Windows emulation) software. This also failed to read the ZIP disk.
One interesting bit of feedback to the ZIP writeup involved the write-protect features on a ZIP drive. The drives and 100MB cartridges DO NOT have a physical write-protect switch. Instead, the drives appear to read some sort of write-protect data from the disk itself. Setting this key is done with some software drivers supplied for Macintosh or PC platforms. It is even possible to protect the disk with a user-specified password. No attempt was made on the HPUX platform to test the effects of write-protecting the disks. A similar problem/feature exists on the JAZ drives. I'll have to write Iomega about whether those features could easily be used from an HPUX platform. I have my doubts.
The Iomega JAZ product is a removable storage disk drive. Cartridges are available in two sizes, 500MByte and 1.0Gbyte. They are popular as primary and backup devices for Mac and PC platforms. Drives cost approximately US$600. The 1GB disk cartridges are about US$130. 500MB cartridges are a little more than half that.
The unit I tested was sold under the name "MicroNet Jaz Advantage". Micronet Technologies Inc. is packaging Iomega's drives in a nice housing with AC power supply, SCSI address selector switch, and Dual Centronics SCSI connectors. A single 1GByte cartridge came with the unit, as well as some Mac software, a SCSI terminator, power cord, and Apple-Scsi-(25-pin D)-to Centronics-SCSI cable. To go directly to an HP712, you would need a different cable, since the 712 has a mini-SCSI-II connector.
The housing has a fan which makes a bit of noise while operating. Not too bad, but I'd find it a problem in a quiet environment. Then again, I don't plan to have to drive on all the time. The unit did not get very warm while running.
Unlike the ZIP drive, the JAZ box allowed for a full range of SCSI addresses. All of my tests were done at ID 4, with the JAZ drive on the end of a SCSI chain, with the terminator on the second connector.
I'll repeat this warning from the last writeup: if you hook this up to a running HPUX system, you run the risk of triggering a re-boot. Everyone recommends that you power down any system before connecting or dis-connecting peripherals using SCSI. I did manage to "hot connect" the drive, in an unpowered state, but I wouldn't recommend this as standard practice. I don't think the JAZ drive is intended to be as portable as the ZIP drives, so I probably won't be shifting it from computer to computer as ZIP drives often are.
All of the following commands were done as root, unless otherwise noted.
The scsiinfo command (not an hp standard; something I picked up somewhere) had no trouble coming up with the device characteristics. With no disk inserted I got the following:
ID 4: Vendor: iomega
Product: jaz 1GB
Revision: G.60
Vendor specific: 02/15/96
Device type: disk
ANSI level 2
ISO level 0
SCSI-2 Response
Supports synchronous I/O, linked commands, command queuing,
Inserting a 1GB cartridge added two more lines:
Block length: 512
Number of blocks: 2091050
When inserting a cartridge, there were a few seconds of delay before
one could mount the drive, since the disk had to spin up to speed.
According to the manual, the disk will spin-down after 30 minutes
of non-use.
I used the "newdisk" command (available from PHCO_5881 patch) to create disktab entries. This added a large number of entries to my /etc/disktab:
iomega_jaz|iomega_jaz_noswap|iomega_jaz_noreserve:\ :No swap or boot:ns#32:nt#16:nc#2042:\ :s0#1045504:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600: iomega_jaz_40MB:\ :40 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1962:\ :s0#1004544:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600: iomega_jaz_68MB:\ :68 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1906:\ :s0#975872:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600: iomega_jaz_100MB:\ :100 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1842:\ :s0#943104:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600: iomega_jaz_150MB:\ :150 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1742:\ :s0#891904:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600: iomega_jaz_200MB:\ :200 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1642:\ :s0#840704:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600: iomega_jaz_300MB:\ :300 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1442:\ :s0#738304:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600: iomega_jaz_400MB:\ :400 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1242:\ :s0#635904:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600: iomega_jaz_500MB:\ :500 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1042:\ :s0#533504:b0#8192:f0#1024\ :se#512:rm#3600:(I manually moved the label "iomega_jaz" from one of the swap entries to the no_swap entry, so that noswap became the default.)
I didn't try using SAM to make a file system or mount the disk. I intended to script these functions anyway, so that non-root users could do them.
/etc/newfs -L -n -v -i 8192 -m 0 /dev/rdsk/c201d4s0 iomega_jaz
"-i 8192" gave a few extra megabytes by reducing the maximum
number of files the disk could hold. About 123000 files
with this setting.
"-m 0" gives no "minfree" amount, which allows me to fill the
disk completely. The performance penalties for almost full
disk weren't so important to me on this type of storage, so
I optimized for maximum capacity.
"-n" no bootstrap programs
"-L" Use long file names
"-v" verbose mode
Formatting only took a few seconds. I was then able to mount the
disk with:
mkdir /jaz
/etc/mount /dev/dsk/c201d4s0 /jaz
The device files /dev/dsk/c201d4s0 and /dev/rdsk/c201d4s0 were
already present on my system. They looked just like the entries
for my builtin scsi disk at address 6.
Once all this was done, I had a disk with about 1.028 GByte of storage. I copied a large amount of stuff as a test with:
time cp -R /etc /jaz
(about 20 Mbytes of stuff) took about 100 seconds. This took about
180 seconds on the ZIP drive. A similar copy of /etc to /tmp, both
on the same internal 1GB hard disk took 110 seconds(!) but that
number is probably slower due to inability to do parallel reads
and write.
Everything looks just like a normally mounted Scsi disk. Like the Zip drive, the JAZ drive "captures" the disk when mounted, and won't let you eject it until it is unmounted. Prevents file system corruption due to unflushed buffers.
I created a few scripts that ran with suid root privileges for the allow general users to format, mount, and unmount ZIP disks.
mountjaz:
---s--x--x 1 root sys /usr/local/bin/mountjaz
#! /bin/ksh
/etc/mount /dev/dsk/c201d4s0 /jaz
umountjaz:
---s--x--x 1 root sys /usr/local/bin/umountjaz
#! /bin/ksh
/etc/umount /dev/dsk/c201d4s0 /jaz
formatjaz:
---s--x--x 1 root sys /usr/local/bin/formatjaz
#! /bin/sh
/etc/newfs -L -n -v -i 8192 -m 0 /dev/rdsk/c201d4s0 iomega_jaz
My primary goal for using the JAZ drive is for secondary storage:
backup & periodic mirroring purposes. The 200Kbytes/second rate
isn't all that great and the capacity is limited compared to tape.
But for standalone systems with 1GB or 2GB this appears to make an
excellent showing as compared to DAT drives.
My last test for the night was to do a complete disk copy of my internal 1GB hard drive. This worked well, although it took about an hour to copy all 700MB. Still, I have complete quick access to every backed up file, and I'm hoping that numerous incremental backups can be placed in separate subdirectories.
Here are the disktab-entries for the iomega jaz-drive:
You can get them (and all other unkonwon disktab-entries) by doing the following steps:
iomega_jaz_noswap|iomega_jaz_noreserve:\
:No swap or boot:ns#32:nt#16:nc#2042:\
:s0#1045504:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
iomega_jaz_40MB:\
:40 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1962:\
:s0#1004544:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
iomega_jaz_68MB:\
:68 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1906:\
:s0#975872:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
iomega_jaz|iomega_jaz_100MB:\
:100 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1842:\
:s0#943104:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
iomega_jaz_150MB:\
:150 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1742:\
:s0#891904:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
iomega_jaz_200MB:\
:200 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1642:\
:s0#840704:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
iomega_jaz_300MB:\
:300 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1442:\
:s0#738304:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
iomega_jaz_400MB:\
:400 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1242:\
:s0#635904:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600:
iomega_jaz_500MB:\
:500 MB swap:ns#32:nt#16:nc#1042:\
:s0#533504:b0#8192:f0#1024\
:se#512:rm#3600: