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Driving a "non-standard" UW LVD SCSI drive



At first I thought I had a problem with my Apple SCSI card (OEMed from ATTO, same as their Express PCI UL2D card except for connnectors, bought from Other World Computing, pulled by them from G4 OS X servers), or possibly termination. But it was the hard drive, proved by adding a more "standard" drive to the internal chain which works fine (i.e., is recognized and mounted by Jaguar). Here are the details and a list of questions.

Configuration:
==============
* Quicksilver 733 MHz G4, running updated Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2.3)

* Apple SCSI card, part number APL6612274(?), OEM version of ATTO UL2D Express PCI card, received with version 1.43 firmware, upgraded to 1.64 firmware.
- During boot process, the ATTOExpressPCI.kext driver (vers. 1.1.0) is "matched" and loaded.

* Internal SCSI cable, twisted-pair ribbon (suitable for LVD), with automatic SE/LVD terminator at end. (Nothing connected to external connector.)

* IBM hard drive, OEM version of Seagate ST318275LW Barracuda drive, 18 GB, Ultra-Wide, SE/LVD
- (Possibly critical detail): The drive ID string is non-standard, "IBM-PSG ST318275LW", (where "PSG" stands for "Personal Systems Group"), rather than "Seagate ST318275LW" (or something similar).
- No driver "matches" and is loaded for this drive <-- THE PROBLEM

* IBM hard drive, DCAS-34330W, 4 GB, Ultra-Wide, SE, (added to test SCSI card, driver loading, etc.)
- Matches and loads "IOSCSIFamily" driver, mounts OK, runs at ~8 MB/s, and, of course, forces internal bus to SE mode when it's installed.

Note that the 18 GB Seagate drive mounts and runs great (18 MB/s) in Mac OS 9.2.2. So the hardware is OK (give or take OS X sensitivity to termination, which I don't think is a problem).

I've been through the "Hello IOKit: Creating a Device Driver..." and related tutorials, the "I/O Kit Fundamentals" doc, etc., to the point that I think I could write a set of matching parameters that would match this drive, but that's not the point. The real question is: Why doesn't the existing Apple SCSI driver match and load for this drive?

Specific questions:
===================
1. Where is the complete and exact "matching language" defined? (There are lots of examples spread throughout the Apple docs, but no definitive table, etc.)

2. I've been through the Info.plist's of the installed kext's but can't sort out anything useful. I can't imagine that Apple is trying to keep track of all the device IDs and various disk vendors. So they must be matching on something like "Peripheral Device Type" equals 0 (block-structured SCSI device).
a) What piece of software queries the device and determines its type?
b) Any pointers to docs/code where the matching process is done for SCSI block-structured devices?

3. The Apple SCSI driver is a driver "family" and complicated enough that I haven't been able to sort out who does what to whom when. Any pointers to concise(!), helpful info here?

4. Is there a debug flag I can set in some Apple kext's Info.plist that would give me useful info on the matching process on the Console?

5. One of the kext tutorials mentions that a kext can consist of only an Info.plist, which sets some parameters and then refers to another kext. This sounds suggestive -- perhaps I could set up my own matching parameters for this drive and then vector off to the standard SCSI driver. How? (I didn't find any other discussion or examples of this.)

6. Any other comments or suggestions? I've got several of these 18 GB drives and I'd like to set up a RAID array with them. (Otherwise I'd get rid of them and spend $80 for a new 80 GB ATA drive :-)

TIA,

Mike Wirth
Palo Alto, CA

PS: Related, but lower priority question:
7. I also have a SIIG AP-40 Ultra-Wide SCSI, SE, card (hardware is same as an Orange Micro Grappler UW card -- I'm using their firmware :-) ID string (Card Name from Apple System Profiler) is: "pci10cd,2300". Works fine in OS 9, but no OS X driver support. Any hope here? Is this hardware the same as any supported SCSI card (e.g., the ACard 6712UW -- there seems to be a lot of cloning of hardware in the Taiwanese cards :-) so that I could change the appropriate Info.plist and load a compatible driver?

PPS: Sorry to be so verbose, but this is the end of a long search for fast SCSI support in OS X for less than $300 :-)
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