A3311A Storage Enclosure, new drives

[Mike Higgs]

Hi, I managed to get my hands on a couple of A3311A storage Enclosures for my HP9000/780 system. They came with 4G drives in the caddies and I wanted to try to upgrade the disk storage so I got hold of a Fujitsu 9.1G SCA drive and swapped out the caddy disk. Now when I boot the system it won't recognise any of the external (enclosure) devices. I have two questions, if this should be possible (I know, not supported but it's for a play system at home) is there something I'm missing? I made sure the one I swapped out was not included in a volume group. Secondly, if it is possible to do this, what's the biggest drive I could add in the hot swap caddies?

The server is running hp-ux 11i and the disk devices are differential.

Many thanks in advance.

Mike Higgs

[A. Clay Stephenson]

AS long as these are not being used for boot devices, HP-UX is rather tolerant of drives. 9GB should be no problem and 18GB drives can also be used. The problem is almost certainly mismatched SCSI flavors. The A3311 JBOD's would accept either SE-SCSI or FWD/HVD SCSI modules --- but the two may not be mixed -- not even terminators. You first need to determine if you are using High-Voltage Differential SCSI. These modules have an interface-card in them that was sometimes used to do a SCSI bus conversion from HVD to LVD/SE. You need to look up the specs on your old drives and then match them to your replacements.

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,

Are you sure it is not a SCSI-interface mismatch, for example the 4GB disks is HVD and the 9GB is LVD or SE. SE and LVD is compatible but not HVD.

[dave daniels_2]

Actually the drives within the caddy are Scsi wide drives. Even though they are differential drives or DF drives on the caddy. There is actually a header board that converts the drives from ultra to differential. The problem you are having is the older 2 & 4gb drives header board did not support the higher end drives. The way you can check is the header board will have some surface mount chips on it if they are supported. if no chips than the drive will not work.

-Dave

[Mike Higgs]

Thanks for the responses. I've had another look inside the caddy and it does have a header board with surface mount chips on. Because of the 9G having the same connector as the 4G I assumed that this meant that they had fairly similar interfaces and hadn't considered the LVD or HVD thing. I'll look into this and see if I can find any more information.

It would be SO convenient if this worked but it doesn't look like it's to be, I'll also have a look around and see if I can find some 9G or 18G caddies.

Thanks again,

Mike