Sun CD-ROM problems

Tue Nov 26 16:08:25 PST 2002

There seem to be two factors operating, here:

1. The POS 24x PC CD-ROM has a long-seek time that seems in the range of 
900ms.  And "boot cdrom" et seq, for Solaris 8, does a lot of these. 
Thousands, I'd say.  (It may be "recalibrating" due to an error, or it may 
not.  It seems to work error-free, just gradually.  And "cat * > /dev/null" 
in e.g. /usr/openwin/lib doesn't produce any such seeks, where / is the 
CD-ROM mounted during suninstall.)

2. When there is no drive on the primary bus (the only hard drive present 
was strapped as a slave, and did not show up at all in "probe-ide"), 
everything seems to take _even longer_.

When I fixed (2), it sped up materially.  So they probably don't test for 
this.  I guess I can understand that.  But I still have a Sun-branded drive 
coming, and I'll bet it's a little faster at (1).  I mean, I remembered 
that this operation sucked, but not _that_ much.