From: Chris Hoogendyk (hoogendyk@bio.umass.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 09 2006 - 14:42:26 EDT
We are trying to straighten out some issues on one of our servers that
has a cabinet of older drives attached. It is an E250 with a dual SCSI
LVD controller (Sun SG-XPCI2SCSI-LM320) and an older dual fast wide
controller that was originally bought with the system a few years ago.
The external cabinets are home built and mostly with Seagate drives
segregated so that all LVD are one cabinet, all fast wide in another,
and some even older narrow in another. The older drives are connected to
the older controller.
The newer drives and the LVD work great. They are connected with a 2
meter cable (Sun X3832A) that we got with the controller.
The older drives issue a series of errors on bootup and the SCSI
negotiates to lower speeds before they begin working. These are also
connected with 2 meter cables, but to the older controller.
We thought that cable length might be the problem and that shorter
cables would do the trick for the older controller and drives. So, we
bought a 3 foot cable from computercablesource.com (SCSU-320L-03).
Then we took down the server, swapped the cables, and ended up getting
phase errors on the connection to the old drives so that they simply did
not work. We had to swap back the Sun cables and bring it back up. It
works, but it just seems we ought to be able to get rid of the errors
and we suspect that the 2 meter cable is too long for the older SCSI
technology.
The main difference we can see in the cables is that the Sun cables have
a ferrite block near both ends.
Do you know what the issue might be and whether this ferrite block is in
some way important?
The cable maker specs say that theirs is fully backwards compatible with
older SCSI technologies, but they simply did not work. Maybe the ferrite
blocks are a red herring, and the cablemaker cables are simply faulty.
TIA,
---------------
Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
---------------
Erdvs 4
-- --------------- Chris Hoogendyk - O__ ---- Systems Administrator c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center ~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst <hoogendyk@bio.umass.edu> --------------- Erdvs 4 _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers
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