What are good HDDs to use with QNX?

My company uses QNX as the OS under our server platform, and we ship out a
few machines a month. Historically we have always used HDDs under 4G and
under 1024 cylinders under the BIOS settings. But now HDDs that small are
getting hard to find and when we do they are used. I must investigate
whether we should be concerned about using HDDs greater than 4G and/or 1024
cylinders.

I was able to successfully install and boot, reboot QNX several times on a
15G drive. It only could see an 8G partition (which is what the support
site indicates), which is fine. But I had to define the drive as having
1871 cylinders, and the support site says you must have <=1024 or you can’t
boot. Was I ok since it was only using a fraction of those cylinders for
the 8G partition?

Can anyone answer these questions:

  1. Will I experience problems if using a >8G drive but only an 8G partition?
  2. Will I experience problems if using a >4G drive and partition?
  3. If I must stick below 8G or 4G, does anyone know of vendors who still
    sell these new?
  4. What are the best brands people have worked with? We like Western
    Digital, but do others work well?
  5. Any other words of wisdom on HDDs and partition sizes?

Thanks,

Joe Larson
ADVANCED BusinessLink

After no small amount of experimentation, we had success using Maxtor 30GB
hard drives, model 53073H6.

Our drives are on some older model Ampro small board computers. We found it
necessary to contact Ampro and get BIOS upgrades.

Also, QNX 4.24 cannot see past the 8GB limit you referred to. We had to
upgrade to QNX 4.25, Patch D.

Good luck. It can be done.

BTW, we tried replacing our sub-8GB, 3.5" drives with 10+GB, 2.5" drives. So
far, we still cannot get the 2.5" drives to work with our computer boards and
QNX 4.25, Patch D. That project has been put off for a future rainy day.

Joseph Larson wrote:

My company uses QNX as the OS under our server platform, and we ship out a
few machines a month. Historically we have always used HDDs under 4G and
under 1024 cylinders under the BIOS settings. But now HDDs that small are
getting hard to find and when we do they are used. I must investigate
whether we should be concerned about using HDDs greater than 4G and/or 1024
cylinders.

I was able to successfully install and boot, reboot QNX several times on a
15G drive. It only could see an 8G partition (which is what the support
site indicates), which is fine. But I had to define the drive as having
1871 cylinders, and the support site says you must have <=1024 or you can’t
boot. Was I ok since it was only using a fraction of those cylinders for
the 8G partition?

Can anyone answer these questions:

  1. Will I experience problems if using a >8G drive but only an 8G partition?
  2. Will I experience problems if using a >4G drive and partition?
  3. If I must stick below 8G or 4G, does anyone know of vendors who still
    sell these new?
  4. What are the best brands people have worked with? We like Western
    Digital, but do others work well?
  5. Any other words of wisdom on HDDs and partition sizes?

Thanks,

Joe Larson
ADVANCED BusinessLink


Michael J. McCormick
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/
Environmental Technology Lab (NOAA/ETL)
R/E/ET1
325 Broadway
Boulder, CO 80305-3328
Tel: 303-497-5077
Fax: 303-497-3577
Email: Michael.J.McCormick@noaa.gov
URL: http://www.etl.noaa.gov/

Use LBA Mode on the drive. It will map the cylinders to below 1024 by increasing the head/sector
counts.
As for the 8Gig limit, use the latest release of QNX.
Careful with SCSI - I’ve noticed that the equivalent to LBA mode doesn’t always map as expected on
some cards…
-Paul

Joseph Larson <joseph@businesslink.com> wrote in message news:91o4pc$680$1@inn.qnx.com

My company uses QNX as the OS under our server platform, and we ship out a
few machines a month. Historically we have always used HDDs under 4G and
under 1024 cylinders under the BIOS settings. But now HDDs that small are
getting hard to find and when we do they are used. I must investigate
whether we should be concerned about using HDDs greater than 4G and/or 1024
cylinders.

I was able to successfully install and boot, reboot QNX several times on a
15G drive. It only could see an 8G partition (which is what the support
site indicates), which is fine. But I had to define the drive as having
1871 cylinders, and the support site says you must have <=1024 or you can’t
boot. Was I ok since it was only using a fraction of those cylinders for
the 8G partition?

Can anyone answer these questions:

  1. Will I experience problems if using a >8G drive but only an 8G partition?
  2. Will I experience problems if using a >4G drive and partition?
  3. If I must stick below 8G or 4G, does anyone know of vendors who still
    sell these new?
  4. What are the best brands people have worked with? We like Western
    Digital, but do others work well?
  5. Any other words of wisdom on HDDs and partition sizes?

Thanks,

Joe Larson
ADVANCED BusinessLink

“Paul Russell” <paul@jenosys.com> wrote in message
news:91o7h7$7j7$1@inn.qnx.com

Use LBA Mode on the drive. It will map the cylinders to below 1024 by
increasing the head/sector
counts.

I am using LBA mode but strangely get 1871 cylinders anyway. Some quirk
with the BIOS version versus how large the drive is perhaps? But not a QNX
question of course

As for the 8Gig limit, use the latest release of QNX.

I was more concerned about the 4G limit, which must be imaginary-- I cannot
find anyone here to explain why we thought it was there.

The thing is, for our application we rarely see even 100M used, and 8G is
far more than sufficient.

Thanks all for the advice

If there are >1024 cylinders and you make a change to the boot image,
then it’s possible (after some disk use) that when you re-write
/.boot it will lie all or partly beyond cylinder 1023. That’s
not good. If you are super cautious, reduce the number of cylinders.

Richard

Joseph Larson wrote:

“Paul Russell” <> paul@jenosys.com> > wrote in message
news:91o7h7$7j7$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …
Use LBA Mode on the drive. It will map the cylinders to below 1024 by
increasing the head/sector
counts.

I am using LBA mode but strangely get 1871 cylinders anyway. Some quirk
with the BIOS version versus how large the drive is perhaps? But not a QNX
question of course

As for the 8Gig limit, use the latest release of QNX.

I was more concerned about the 4G limit, which must be imaginary-- I cannot
find anyone here to explain why we thought it was there.

The thing is, for our application we rarely see even 100M used, and 8G is
far more than sufficient.

Thanks all for the advice

Ensure that you delete ALL partitions BEFORE changing the disk mode (LBA<->Normal)
If partitions still exist while booting, then the LBA/Normal Selection may be ignored in favour of
the actually detected configuration…
Not always, but I’ve seen it happen on some systems…
Also check that FDisk and the BIOS are displaying the same Cylinder/Head/Sector Settings,
or some history may be being detected on the drive and confusing either of these operations.
-Paul

Joseph Larson <joseph@businesslink.com> wrote in message news:91o8mk$894$1@inn.qnx.com

“Paul Russell” <> paul@jenosys.com> > wrote in message
news:91o7h7$7j7$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …
Use LBA Mode on the drive. It will map the cylinders to below 1024 by
increasing the head/sector
counts.

I am using LBA mode but strangely get 1871 cylinders anyway. Some quirk
with the BIOS version versus how large the drive is perhaps? But not a QNX
question of course

As for the 8Gig limit, use the latest release of QNX.

I was more concerned about the 4G limit, which must be imaginary-- I cannot
find anyone here to explain why we thought it was there.

The thing is, for our application we rarely see even 100M used, and 8G is
far more than sufficient.

Thanks all for the advice