Fujitsu Disk Compatibility Question

[doris grady]

I have a Sun server that is being retired. It is directly attached to a disk array with eight (8)disks inside. The disks are 36GB Fujitsu MAN3367M disks, Revision: 1804

I want to reuse these disks and install them across several HP2110 arrays that are attached to rp7400 servers. Are these disks compatible/or will it work/any gotchas? Thanks.

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

Hi,

the situation in general is like this:

There are disks from several vendors running in HP systems, but almost all with a special HP firmware.

Disks made for other server manufacturers may have another special firmware and probably cannot run with hp-ux.

[Bill Hassell]

As Torsten mentioned, disks come with different firmware. In browsing the Seagate wbesite, the same disk model came with more than 30 (!!) firmware versions. Now you might plug in the drives and they seem to work OK for ultra-simple tasks (rd, wt, seek) but usually the firmware falls apart when specialized tasks like relocating bad sectors or reporting / recovering from a disk error. The OS is expecting one behavior and gets another. Maybe the HP-UX driver will survive, maybe it will crash. There won't be any matrix of tested firmware, just the HP versions. I wouldn't use the drives on a production system.