AIT100 External problems

[Shaun_19]

Hi,

Wondered if anyone knows of any problems running an AIT100 external drive on the internal smart array 5i on a proliant dl380g3

We keep on losing visability of the tape drive. Also get error messages when server boots up sometimes. If we power cycle the drive then it gets detected.

I was seriously thinking of using a seperate SCSI card (64bit) to see if it helps.

I installed the HP tape tools and everything checks out.

[Allan_24]

Use a separate SCSI card dedicated for your tape drive only.If i'm not mistaken your drive utilized ultra 160 wide lvd/se try to use this specs.

[Stuart Whitby]

This might be a problem with SCSI chain length. By adding the external drive, you've now got the length of the internal (I assume) cabling to the RAID array and then the external cable to the tape drive.

The card should send a SCSI reset at boot time under Windows, meaning that you should not have to do a hard reset on the drive. Fibre cards can be configured not to send this - not sure if the same is possible on a SCSI card, but it might not be a bad idea to check.

My guess is that this is a signal problem and, given its intermittent nature, this is likely to be either cable length or termination.