SUMMARY: Yes, 6-disk CDROM readers are available

From: Winston Edmond (wbe@bbn.com)
Date: Sun Jan 19 1992 - 18:21:29 CST


   I received several replies to my query about whether or not the Pioneer
6-disk CDROM readers could be used with a Sun. There are at least four
sources for them (in no particular order):

(1) Relax Technology Voice: 510-471-6112
        3101 Whipple Road FAX: 510-471-6267
        Union City, CA 94587
        "No charge for credit cards" Ship same day via FedEx.
        Advertised price: US $1,159 (Sun Observer, January 1992, page 31)

(2) Tracer Technologies Voice: 800-872-2370
        19584 Clubhouse Road Voice: 301-977-1398
        Gaithersburg, MD 20879 FAX: 301-869-7033
        Price: US ~$1,695.00
        A Salesman: Frank Lee
        Product name: The DJ-6 (for SPARCstations and Servers)

        (From the ads:)
        * Supports all High-Sierra, ISO 9660, and Audio CDs
        * Audio output (RCA and mini-headphone jacks) with
          volume control, works with Sun's audio CD tool
        * Includes cables, terminator, SunOS driver, caddy

        Perhaps the biggest feature: the person that wrote the driver for
        them reads this mailing list and would help if there were any
        problems with it.

(3) Instar Voice: 403-264-7274
        Suite 306 Fax: 403-264-7286
        205 9th Avenue S.E.
        Calgary, Alberta
        Canada T2G 0R3
        Price: Can $2,200

        Includes: Drive, software, manuals
        Observed working feature: able to boot from the first disk
        Supports audio

(4) Young Minds Voice: 714-335-1350
        (southern California)
        Price: $1395 (to Jet Propulsion Labs, don't know if they're getting a
                discount)

Wolfgang Huwig also replied with these words of caution:

>Tenor was: READING should be possible but BOOTING is the problem.
>
>Chances are good that a SPARC machine (sun4, sun4c) can read from any
>CD-ROM [reader -WBE] if it runs under 4.1.x (evtl. 4.0.3 and a special
>driver from Sun) and the drive supports 512 byte blocks.
>
>Non-Sun CD-ROM [readers] are unlikely to allow booting on any Sun machine.
>Even Sun's CD-ROM [reader] allows booting without problems only on sun4c
>machines. For sun4 machines this depends on the prom, cpu and SCSI rev
>levels (sun3 machines seem not to work at all with non-Sun CD-ROMs).
>
>Possibilities to get some problematical combination to work together are
>purchasing the Sun Common SCSI Arch driver from Sun Consulting or a
>special driver from some 3rd party vendor such as Young Minds.
>While experimenting a bad SCSI bus may destroy data on a connected hard
>drive, so try on a diskless machine first.

My thanks to all those who replied:
  horen@rs.com (Jonathan B. Horen)
  "Don Witt (Unruh 91/05/03" <donwitt@physics.ubc.ca>
  Mike Caplinger <mocvax!miranda!mc@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>
  Scott Carson <sdc@cs.umd.edu> (wrote the driver for Tracer Technologies)
  Todd L. Kindig @ Micom Comm. Corp.
  wolf@sol.cs.uni-sb.de (Wolfgang Huwig) of Fachbereich Informatik,
        Universitaet des Saarlandes
 -WBE



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