SAS hot swap disk question

[troy12n_1]

I ran into an issue recently where a drive on one of my G5 servers died (a 146g 10k SAS), and one of my junior admins picked a drive off the shelf, put it in and it would not rebuild. He was confused and escalated it to one of our other admins, who figures out the issue. The original drive that failed was a 146g 10k, single port 3g drive. The one he attempted to put in it was a 146g 10k dual port 6g drive. Apparently you cannot mix and match these disks.

This brought me to have a complete inventory done on all of our spare disks and disks in servers, and it was alarming.

There are tons of different disks with different rotational speeds, ports, transfer rates and labeling to indicate they are different disks.

I used this document to create a spreadsheet of all disks we have in inventory and what disks are suitable to be placed in what server.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00305257&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=397642

However, in this document, some of the stuff does not match up. For instance, I have several disks that are labeled 72g 1 port serial scsi (384842-B21), however in this above document it shows it as a 10k DUAL port sas drive.

The labeling is very confusing and at times seems unreliable, so I am asking how other organizations deal with this. At some point, HP changed the labeling on the drives from serial scsi to SAS, then possibly back again? Some say single port or dual port, some dont say anything about ports.

I have disks that say the following
serial scsi 1 port
serial scsi dual port
SAS dual port
SAS

Sometimes single port disks have "spare part #" of dual port drives, sometimes spart part number is of a single port drive.

I am thoroughly confused, it seems I have to throw a disk in a server and fire up SIM or HP onboard diagnostics to find out what a disk actually is...

[troy12n_1]

Also, is a P400 or P800 controller compatible with 6GB SAS disks?

[Clarete Riana]

Product features for SAP400 and SAP800 only mention 3G SAS and not 6G.

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

sure you can put a 6G SAS disk into you server. But the controller will only operate with 3G.

Regards,
Patrick

[troy12n_1]

I kind of figured that would be the case, Ok, anyone got an answer to the other question.