Can an LTO drive be connected to an K360 server with 28696A SCSI adapter?

[Leonidas Sinos]

In our company we have an old K360/9000 server with an 28696A Wide SCSI adapter. We tried to connect an IBM LTO 3580, but the system does not load the right driver (it loads tape2 instead of stape. Is the any way to override this problem and make the device operational?
Can anyone of any help.
Thanks in advance.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You are probably fighting two different problems. The 28696A is a High-Voltage Differential SCSI (HVD) device while I strongly suspect that your LTO drive is an LVD SCSI device as are most of the newer SCSI devices. The two are absolutely incompatible and can destroy tape drives, controllers, and terminators if connected. The driver problem is no big deal. You need to go into SAM and make sure that 'stape' in 'In' and build a kernel if necessary. You can always use ioscan with -d and -H options to override the device assignments if the default ioscan "guesses" wrong.

[Pete Randall]

I suspect a SCSI mismatch. Accordign to the IBM site,

"# IBM 3580 Models L11 and L13 Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium External Tape Drives feature an Ultra2/Wide SCSI Low Voltage Differential (LVD) interface
# IBM 3580 Models H11 and H13 Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium External Tape Drives feature an Ultra/Wide SCSI High Voltage Differential (HVD) interface"


According to Partsurfer, the 28696A is a "Fast wide differential SCSI-2 host adapter board kit".

I don't think you can mix FastWide and UltraSCSI.


Pete

[Leonidas Sinos]

Thanks for your help.
Our tape is an H11 model so it is HVD.
Looking in IBM's and HP's sites, we found out it is not supported.

[Eugeny Brychkov]

FYI: tape2 driver is correct one for tape devices connected to SCSI cards installed in HP-PB slots
Eugeny

[Steven E. Protter]

The LTO drive is just as A. Clay says. LVD SCSI. Just hooking it up risks damage to the device and the system.


You are going to need another I/O card to make that work.

SEP

[Angus Crome]

A few additions;

The H11 should work with the K360 on either HP-PB your card or the HSC equivalent. Although stape works alright on the newer hardware against IBM's LTO, it doesn't seem to work on the older stuff very well. If you want to make it work better, download the IBM specific driver from the IBM website;
http://www.storage.ibm.com/storagesmart/lto/support/lto_ftp.htm

and perform the install for the tape driver only. You don't need the library driver, schgr should work fine.

The other thing to note, only with really good compression will you be able to maintain streaming on an HP-PB connection. I would strongly suggest getting the HSC card for that machine, as it does much better at sustained throughput. You can get them from vendors for around $60-75, or off ebay occasionally for less.