disk drives replacement

[Tom Ruganis]

I have 12 2-GB Gast Wide SCSI Disk Expansion Kit (C3554U) that is going to "expire" on 06/01/01. I need to get replacement for that. Does anyone know of any company resources that I can find this out? Or the replacements products that I should be checking out? I need to get someone in here to install and configure it as well. I tried Triad, but they're on the west coast (I'm on the east), and they mentioned that installation would be questoinable. Any information that you can provide is greatly appreciated.

[Tim Malnati]

These sound like old 6000 series drives. My suggestion would be deep six these where replacing drives in a 6000 enclosure is VERY expensive. A better move would be to purchase a Jamaica enclosure with four 9 gb drives. It's a lot less money, better performance, will fit easily in the space that the 6000 drawers vacate, and they are hot swappable.

Your local HP sales rep should be able to handle this and have HP do the hardware install as well. There is nothing to configuring these units from a software point of view other than creating a volume group and logical volume(s) and then recreating the file systems. If this is more than you can handle, purchase an hour or two of time with your local HP SE who can have this configured in no time.

[melvyn burnard]

The HASS or JAMACA boxes now also take the 18Gb discs, and wil I think soon take a 36Gb disc!

[Tim Malnati]

I would be very careful about attempting to replace 12 spindles with a 36GB drive. Although you have more capacity at a lower price, there are some significant issues with data access and throughput through a single set of drive heads. This can be even more problematic if your current arrangement is striped.

[Anthony deRito]

Get rid of those old Series 6000 storage systems. They are finding it difficult to get parts for them. Go with a NIKE disk array or a Jamaca Box depending on what kind of storage you need. Maybe your in store for a XP256!

Your sales rep can give you more info.

Tony

[Michael Lampi]

These drives are Fast Wide _Differential_ SCSI drives. Unless you also use a High Voltage Differential to LVD or SE converter, you will be unable to make use of the newer 18GB, 36GB and 73GB disk drives.

Yes, I highly recommend you dump the old 2GB drives in favor of several newer, larger capacity drives. Given that your current SCSI interface can only handle 20MB/sec, striping won't help you very much as any new disk drive can transfer data at that rate on a continuous basis.

There are many sources for these drives, including HP and third parties. Be sure that whomever you pick to provide them understands that you have a "high voltage differential" SCSI bus on your system.