HP9000/K260 SCSI Question

[Gary Cowell]

Folks,

I've just been handed one of the above to look after and I have no HP hardware experience (although lots of general UNIX and Sysadmin on AIX and Solaris so I'm not totally green).

Anyway, this machine is critically short of space and I'm looking into upgrade options. The machine is not leased nor is there a maintenance contract on it. It does not run production systems but is used as a development platform.

It has 2 SCSI Disk systems on it, the internal GSA FW SCSI is connected through a differential converter to an aincient StorageTek cabinet with several Quantum ATLAS II 4GB drives in it. Another Cabinet (HP one, square box) is connected via an add in scsi card (I forget the part number of the add in card, I'm posting this from home).

I'm happy with the HP cabinet.

What I'd like to do is to upgrade the disks hanging off the 'GSA Built In Fast/Wide SCSI' adapter to Seagate 18GB units. (Model number ST318417W).

I asked seagate if these were compatible but they wouldn't commit themselves, mumbling about propriatary SCSI interfaces [on HP].

I can't find technical documentation on the hardware of the K260 on the net or the GSA Built In F/W SCSI adapter so I'm left wondering if this will all work.

I'd appreciate if someone could help please. The K260 is running HP-UX 11.00.

Thanks very much.

Regards

Gary

[Gary Cowell]

I think I meant to say that the drives would be attached to the GSC Built In Fast/Wide SCSI (not GSA!)

From reading other posts I get the feeling that using this drive would be not recommended or impossible. But the K260 has been running with a non-HP storagetek and Atlas drives for years now so I don't think that's an issue to me so long as it will work.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi,

In general these boxes are very tolerant of the kind of drives that they will support for everything but boot drives. I would leave the boot device alone but you must make absolutely certain that any drive you select is a High-Voltage Differential device rather than LVD SCSI which is much more common these days. Mixing the two is a big no-no and you can take out drives, controllers, terminators, ... . Smoke is generally considered to be a bad sign.

[Gary Cowell]

Thanks for your input.

The disks in the storagetek that I want to replace with bigger units are just simple old SCA disks. No differential SCSI there at all.

There is a differential SCSI widget (long rectangular silver box with power in, diff scsi in and scsi out) sitting between the diff.scsi output from the K260 and the existing non.diff disks.

I think this means that if I replace one or more of the old AtlasII disks with newer 80 pin SCA Ultra SCSI disks they will just work.

I won't be touching the boot device at all.