SCSI support in Linux for 2K blocksize?

[mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

John Abreau wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 JA> I have a Fujitsu DynaMO 640 MO drive that I've been unable
 JA> to use on my Linux system; Linux reports that the MO disk
 JA> has a 2K block size and that the scsi driver doesn't support
 JA> this. I'm using Redhat 5.2 with its 2.0.36 kernel.

 JA> Are the scsi drivers in the 2.2.x kernel expected to support
 JA> larger block sizes?

I wrote quite a lot of hackish code some years ago to support optical media,
specifically jukeboxes.  I am reluctant to comment further without a little
research because most of my information is way out of date, at least three
years old now, but I'll check into this quickly and try to post something.

For what it's worth, these drives use hard-sectored media, so often you can
find the media with the smaller sector size and fix the problem that way. 
Also, some drives -- I don't know about the Fujitsu -- will allow sending a
MODE SELECT command to change the block size and then handle the translation in
firmware, which is nice work if you can get it.
 
-- Mike


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