Sun Microsystems External Mammoth Tape Drive

Hello everyone,

Maybe someone with some experience with the
Sun Microsystems external Exabyte EXB-8900 can help
with strange problems.

At the moment I haven't been able to test it with my
Sun Ultra 60, it is down at the moment as a video
adapter is killing system boards.

What I have tested it with is two machines.
One has an Adaptec 29160 and the other with
an Adaptec 2940W. I have an LSI MegaRAID
controller I will test it with in the future.

Right now I have these problems:

The drive has problems reading and writing and erasing tapes.

I was told by someone who used the drive just fine that
they ended up having to get an adaptec cable that used
high byte termination. It looks to me the drive does
automatic high and low termination, not sure why
someone would need cables with high byte termination.

If the drive is in wide negotiation it has troubles writing
and then while reading it gets up to around 10% and fails with
Mammoth Tools with a 100MB test write and read.

If I turn off wide negotiation the scsi bus settles down a bit
with noise and it will write and read all the way, but the
drive is having problems reading and writing as the activity
light shows it and Mammoth Tools will report it.

The person said that his combination of an adaptec external cable
and an Adaptec 2940UW Pro worked well. He had problems with the drive
till he got an adaptec cable for it. He hardly used the drive, it is
practically new.

The other combination he had was an Ultra 60 with the Sun external
cables 68HD to 68HD 530-2384-01 but didn't recall which scsi adapter
was in the machine if any. Might have just used the external scsi
connector on the system board.

No telling how it will work with the symbios chipset on the Ultra60
board and the external cables with the sun part number 530-1884-03.

Anyone know the fundamental differences between 530-1884-03 and
530-2384-01 cables? It is clearly a hardware problem, seems to be
lots of noise on the scsi bus possibly. Seems it might be picky
with the combination of hardware.

Sincerely,

William
.

Relevant Pages

  • W2100z SCSI weirdness
    ... Anybody know a good reason why two different U320 LVD/SE comaptible ... cables / terminators apparently won't work with the Adaptec AIC-7902W ... in the Sun W2100z, but the original Sun cable / terminator still works? ... Both the cables in question are new; one of them is a no-name that I ...
    (comp.sys.sun.hardware)
  • Re: TOP Network Interface Port of a Sun Ultra 30
    ... when I connect an ethernet cable from the Linux port to the working Sun ... relatively easy switch of cables -- the cable going to the router/cable ...
    (comp.sys.sun.hardware)
  • RE: [SLE] Adding SCSI Tape Drive
    ... > to use the 3 connectors at the same time. ... Well, I finally got the tape drive installed but, contrary to the Adaptec ... drive) and 50-pin connectors when both were on channel A. ... (To mix wide/narrow on the same cables ...
    (SuSE)
  • Re: Adaptec in U10 headache
    ... Beardy wrote: ... The Adaptec 2940U is a PC based card. ... There should be some other PC based cards that can be used in a Sun ... Er der nogen der mangler en mand med lidt viden om Sun HW og SW, ...
    (comp.unix.solaris)
  • Re: CAT-5 buried, exposed to sun
    ... Unless it is explicitly designed and rated for outdoor (direct ... the PVC jacket gets progressively turned into brittle dust where the sun ... telephone cables use a high-density polyethylene outer jacket. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)