Hot Plug Drive Cage & Backplane

[Jason Cecchin]

I have a question regarding a set of parts - "SCSI drive cage, four slot" (p/n 159137-001) and a matching "4-slot scsi drive simplex backplane board" (387090-001) which is used in some DL380 G4 and ML 350 G1 servers.

Is this assembly capable of U320 speeds. Ie. if I were to plug a U320 speed drive into this hotswap slot and have it run at U320 speed.

Some people I ask say yes some say no.

[Jason Cecchin]

If the above config was not suitable for U320 speed would the "6 Bay hot-swap cage" (366862-001) and either a simplex or duplex backplane run at U320 speed instead.

[e4services]

Well that would depend on the backplane board and the controller it was hooked to, and nothing to do with the cage itself.

If the part is used in the G4, was said to be U320, you would think. But then you read the description of the part and it reads "4-Slot SCSI drive simplex backplane board, connects to the back of the Wide Ultra2 drive cage " Then I think no. The fact that it is listed with the G4 is a mistake, because they also list the correct part, 228502-001 or may other numbers, that is indeed U320 for the G4.

But again you would need a U320 RAID controller on one end and U320 drives on the other, to use the added throughput if the board could support it. If the board can not pass data that fast, yes the controller would be hampered to what ever the throughput ends up being with U320 drives on the other end

[Jason Cecchin]

I undertand what you are saying. Its not the cage which is the restricting factor but the backplane electronics.

Currently we have a SA 6404 in the server and the disks we are using are U320 capable.

Like you I am confused about the backplane that is attached to the 4 slot cage - short answer is I am leaning towards the fact its Ultra2 only since its used mainly in servers of that vintage. I think the DL380 G4 reference is not correct.

Question is if the backplane I quoted is not compliant with U320 LVD is there a internal 4 slot hotswap cage with an independant backplane which I can use? Most of the backplanes seem to be 2U or 3U rackmount configured and don't have an independant cage as such. There seems to be a six slot one (P/N: 366862-001, 3665665-001) but that doesn't fit very well because its too big. (and we are only using 3 drives)