DIP switches on HP DDS-4 drives

[Oliver D. Jones]

Hi,

I recently added an HP C5683A DDS-4 tape drive to my Sun Blade 2000. It's actually branded as a Sun X6295A drive, but it is a rebadged HP unit. The SCSI chain in the Sun Blade 2000 is a 50-pin IDC, but on the back of the HP drive, it had a 68-pin connector. So I bought and used a 50-pin to 68-pin male-to-male converter to attach the drive.

On power-up, OBP recognised the drive as an HP when I did a probe-scsi-all. However, when I booted Solaris 10 (08/07) with the -r (reconfigure) switch, I got a load of warnings about the SCSI parity being incorrect - but at the end, Solaris reported that it switched the drive to narrow mode, and the warnings stopped. On subsequent boots, I do not get any SCSI warnings - although if I ever boot with a reconfigure, the warnings appear on that boot.

My question is this: Is there a way to configure this drive so it uses Narrow SCSI mode, instead of Wide? Solaris 10 seems smart enough to figure things out and make the adjustments, but I want to put Solaris 8 on this machine as well, at some stage. It would be better to just configure the drive as a Narrow SCSI, so the OS doesn't have to do any guesswork. I'd also like to disable the hardware compression. How can I do this?

Does anyone have a list of what the DIP switches on the drive are for? All I see in the HP documentation I've downloaded, are the switches in a particular setting - but there was never any explanation of what each indivudual switch did. Unfortunately the Sun documentation doesn't cover this detail either (just setting SCSI ID and that's it), so I'm none the wiser! I'd also like to know what the first two jumpers on the drive (next to the SCSI ID jumpers) are for.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Kindest regards,

Oliver.

P.S. This thread has been moved from Archival Products to Tape Libraries and Drives - HP Forums moderator

[Pieter 't Hart]

there is a link to some dip-switch settings in
http://forums2.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=623842.

from this document :
The HP SureStore DAT40 drive is an ultra wide SCSI device. For optimum
performance it should be connected to a low voltage differential (LVD) SCSI
host adapter.