Re: Sun Microsystems External Mammoth Tape Drive
- From: dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx (DoN. Nichols)
- Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 05:46:33 +0000
According to William Harrington <wwh20610@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Hello everyone,
Maybe someone with some experience with the
Sun Microsystems external Exabyte EXB-8900 can help
with strange problems.
Is the Exabyte in a Sun Unipack housing? Or is it in some other
manufacturer's housing?
The Sun Unipack will auto terminate the bus as needed, as long
as it is the end of the bus, or it will terminate the high side when
there is a narrow SCSI connected downstream from it. (It will be up to
you to terminate that part past the other drives, however.)
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.
Oops!
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.
Hmm ... does your drive have the LCD readout on the front? If
so, have you watched it through the full startup sequence? It will tell
you if the drive needs to be fed a cleaning tape. (And it will complain
in just such a manner if you feed it a tape from earlier non-Mammoth
drives. Just one tape is enough to set it wailing "unclean" and
insisting on being fed a cleaning tape.
If your drive does not have the LCD readout, the upper LED to
the left of the tape slot will go on when it (thinks that it) needs cleaning.
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,
I'm not sure that the drive does this, but the Unipack enclosure
(which is probably what you have, if it has 68-pin connectors on the
back). Note that the connectors are explicitly marked "IN" and "OUT",
and I believe that the termination only works if the feed comes in the
"IN" connector.
not sure why
someone would need cables with high byte termination.
For using a narrow device on a wide SCSI bus.
Note that the Mammoth 1 drives (8900) have two, or perhaps even
three different SCSI cards which can be part of it. I've got examples
of two of those.
1) The 68-pin LVD (it should be marked "LVD" on a label on the
drive -- and you can hope that the SCSI card in the drive is
the one which came with it.)
This one *should* auto-negotiate to talk to a SE SCSI host
adaptor.
2) (Perhaps) a 68-pin SE SCSI bus.
3) a 50-pin SE SCSI buss.
One of the two 68-pin versions is in my Exabyte EZ17 tape
jukebox.
I have two of the 50-pin versions in other housings. One in a
Unipack, and one in a four-drive housing on a 50-pin SCSI Sbus card hung
on an Ultra-2 for backup media and DVD-RW drive.
Have you opened the housing (presuming a Multpack) to see
whether it is a 50-pin or a 68-pin connector in the drive? That is done
by pressing in the two latches on the sides near the back, and pivoting
the cover up around the front, and lifting it clear. If your drive is a
50-pin SE, and you're connecting it to LVD, your voltages may not be
right. (Or maybe the Unipack adapts the voltage levels.)
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.
Mammoth tools? What OS are these running on? Given the host
adaptor cards which you have mentioned, it may well be a Windows system,
in which case I would consider that there are just too many places where
things could go wrong.
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.
No LCD readout on the front, then? A pity, as that can be a big
help.
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.
Hmm ... I had some problems with one drive for a while, until I
got a second one from eBay with a 50-pin SCSI interface card built in,
and swapped interface cards to put that in the EZ-17. The other
interface card went into the flakey drive, which then started to work
properly with a 50-pin bus.
Of course, to use them on the Ultra-2, I first had to either
touch /reconfigure and reboot, or to run "devsfadm" to do the same thing
without having to reboot.
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.
Doesn't the Ultra-60 have a built-in SCSI? (I don't know,
because I don't have one.)
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.
Give a bit more information, such as what SCSI bus is inside the
external housing (which I've been assuming to be a Sun Unipack). And
I've never used one of these with a PCI based SCSI bus, only with the
68-pin SCSI bus on the Ultra-2.
Note that the PCI SCSI cards for the Ultra-5, Ultra-10, and
other PCI-bus equipped Suns can be either a dual 68-pin lvd, or a dual
68-pin SE bus -- and the only way to tell is by looking up which Sun
part number you have in a copy of the Sun FEH (Field Engineer's
Handbook), or on a Sun website, if you have the password/account to do
so.
Good Luck,
DoN.
--
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- References:
- Sun Microsystems External Mammoth Tape Drive
- From: William Harrington
- Sun Microsystems External Mammoth Tape Drive
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