Interfacing CRDS hardware to a COTS platform

The SCSI disks can be plugged into a suitable controller (we use Adaptec), sometimes a cable or adapter is required to connect from SCSI-2 or SCSI-3 physical connectors. With SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 the electrical interface and the software interface supports SCSI-1 (all Charles Rivers Disks are SCSI-1).

Unfortunately the old MFM and Interphase drives are incompatible

We recommend that data is copied off the UNOS disk onto the industry standard drives on the COTS platform. We do not recommend running with a CRDS disk due to performance and reliability implications.

The VME based hardware cards can be interfaced to a PCI bus, but again we do not recommend this. Also in our opinion this partly defeats the principles of upgrading to COTS hardware, as the Instruction Station will still be reliant on expensive vendor supported or unsupported hardware.

We recommend that the operating software is copied onto the COTS platform (usually via QIC-Tape) although it is possible to do this via serial comms (slow) or ethernet.

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