2 SAS LTO-4 Tape Drive in 1U Rackmount

[Rudolf Iten]

We want to use two Ultrium 1760 SAS drives in the 1U HP Storage Works Rackmount Kit.
The server is a AiO1200 with P800 Smart Array Controller. At the external port1 is a MSA60 Array connected. Port2 is connected to the chassis of the two SAS tape drives. (4x mini SAS to mini SAS). With this connection, the system will recognize only one drive. If I connect to the other port at the tape drive chassis, I'll see the other drive. But I never see 2 drives. In the chassis is a SAS expander board build in. So it should show me both drives. How can I operate 2 SAS tape drives in that chassis?

[Curtis Ballard · Accepted solution]

The board in that chassis isn't an expander, it is a signal regenerator and each channel is independent so you have to have two cables to connect to both tape drives. If you want to connect both tape drives to the same controller the only cable that will work is the 1x4 cable that is specified for the MSL G3 tape libraries but at this time that falls into the category or should work perfectly but not technically a supported configuration.

[Urban Shocker]

Were you able to get this working? I have a similar config. AIO1200, P800 FW 5.26, single Ultrium 1760 SAS LTO-4 IU Rackmount tape drive. Drives are on port 4I and tape drive on 2E. If I move the tape to 1E it is not seen at all. The issue is that DPE sees the drive but backup fail at about 10% status the connection to the tape drive has been lost. We had NTFS errors and forced to check disk only on the RAID5 volumes when the AIO was rebooted. At this point the tape was working perfectly. Support stated we need to flash the P800 from 4.12 to 5.26 firmware to fix the NTFS issue and apply SR1.4.3 and AIO uodate 1.5.0 which we did.
No the NTFS errors are gone but now backups fail at about 10% using DPE 4.00SP1.

Can you share your version of software and firmware? Do you use DPE with your tape drive. Is your tape drive on the same external port as your drives are internally? So 2E to 4I ports.

[Rudolf Iten]

We lost a lot of time in order to get the SAS tape drives working. At the end, we are not able to work this configuration with the external ports E1/E2 of the P800 controller. Instead we now use a 3x/1x split cable wich
is conncted from one Internal port.(Cable AE464)
The second SAS Tape drive in the chassis is then conncted with the same type of cable from another P800 controllers internal port of another server.
Firmware:5.26
Driver 6.14.0.32
But we use DPE 3.5.2
It is not a really smart solution, but it seems to work.