LA>    Jeez....you learn something every day in this echo!!
MB> We try.  :-)
   It's working!  
MB> The importance of disabling hardware write cache on drives connected to 
NetWare
  > servers has been thoroughly documented.  See, for example, Novell TID 
2914137,
  > which discusses the issue in the context of Micropolis drives and gives
  > specific instructions on how to disable their write caches, but makes 
clear
  > that the need to disable write caches is applicable to all brands of 
drive.
 LA>    I wonder if this is the source of the drive corruption 
 LA> problems I'm seeing on my Seagate Hawk 2 gigers running under 
 LA> Warp Server? 
MB> It's quite likely; Novell TID 2925087 specifically mentions the Seagate 
Hawk
  > and its NetWare incompatibility with write cache enabled.  This TID is so
  > on-target about your problem that I'll post an excerpt here:
MB>    Novell has seen these types of errors on a regular basis with 
customers who
   >   use large drives with the "write cache" enabled on them.
   >   Seagate's... 
MB> I don't know if I can find a document from IBM in the OS/2 context on 
this, but
  > I can assure you I have a lot of knowledge about how the internal SCSI 
stack
  > and filesystem works in OS/2, and the discussion from Novell is equally
  > applicable to OS/2 HPFS, more so for HPFS386.
   Since I AM running HPFS386, this may be why I was starting to 
   consider the wisdom of doing so...
   The biggest problem seems to be with a 2 gig drive partitioned 
   1.7 gig in HPFS386 and the balance in FAT. Gets fairly constant 
   errors from chkdsk (ONLY on the HPFS partition), necessitating a 
   boot from floppy to fix... annoying to say the least.
MB> You can get Seagate's official utility to manipulate the write cache 
enable bit
  > on the appropriate device mode page, APSI-WCE, at:
   Got it yesterday. 
MB> I can save you a lot of aggravation that you will encounter when trying 
to make
  > sense of the Seagate docuemtation: for OS/2, turn off the write cache.
   For Warp workstations, as well as Server?
   I'll bet that Win95 would probably do OK with it on?
   And I'll bet that NT on the same machine will turn into a *real* 
   pig without it.
                                       LRA
                                                                           
---
 þ SPEED 2.00 #2720 þ It works better if you plug it in.
---------------