Fuel and SCA80 disks - Printable Version

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Fuel and SCA80 disks - roach-commuter - 05-14-2021

I purchased an HP Drive Cage that was used with Proliant servers (HP SCSI Drive Cage 2-bay Hot Plug Wide U2 with 258051-001 253761-001 351126-001) with the intention of pimping up my Fuel by basically installing it and using these drives instead of the standard drives. This cage has a 68 pin connector and is meant to be used with LVD U320 disks so I thought this would be perfect. The cage has 2 slots, one is marked as 0 and the other as 1. I believe these are also the scsi IDs that get assigned automatically to the drives when you slide them in. Now if I place 2 drives in it , I can see that the fuel does not like it. Hinv spits out some preposterous info and it tells me I have like 15 drives installed. The same goes if I only leave the drive in the 0 slot. However if I remove drive 0 and only leave drive 1 , hinv only sees 2 drives. A drive 1 and a drive 15 (Drive 1 is ok , but where does the drive 15 come from? I think it's an artifact caused by the drive cage rom or something. Since I don't have the drive cage manuals I am curious : is ti possible to change the default scsi ID for the Fuel controller (which I believe is set to 0) ?

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - Raion - 05-14-2021

No, this sounds like you are setting the device ID incorrectly. But I've never dealt with NAS drives personally.

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - Shiunbird - 05-14-2021

This could be a termination issue, okr:

When I had my IntelliStation 285, it had such bays. I had somewhere an adapter to use hot-swap discs on standard SCSI buses. It had a jumper for the SCSI ID + molex for power.

My backplane had, if I recall correctly, some sort of jumper. In one position, it would assign certain IDs to the trays, and in another, it would assign others.
But it would go bananas without the jumper.

Edit: not the backplane, but the drive cage itself, the back of it.

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - weblacky - 05-15-2021

The drive cage MIGHT have a SCSI enclosure processor as a SCSI device (SCSI Enclosure Services, SES). If it supports failure LED indication then it has the SCSI device processor and uses an ID on it's own (like like External RAID enclosures do). It MIGHT even support emulating ALL device IDs for hot-swap emulation...or others may be right and it's not correctly terminated at the chain end.

This enclosure is not a generic enclosure, it's made by HP for a specific product line, I'm unsure how you thought this was going to be compatible outside it's designed product line. It's not a generic 3-bay body to fit a normal AT/ATX case. It's not got any labelling on it's headers, so you don't know what any of them really does. HP appears to have trashed the instructions for it "HP Internal Two-Bay Hot-Plug SCSI Drive Cage installation instructions" that are referenced in proliant docs. So Id' say, it's proprietary and not strictly SCSI compliant on its own.

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - roach-commuter - 05-15-2021

UPDATES: Ok so the original SCSI enclosure has indeed an ID of its own, and it's ID15 , in the end I had to swap it with another enclosuer (which previously was mounted inside an HP Z400 workstation) . The main problem with the original enclosure is that the SCSI IDs are fixed (0 in the bottom slot and 1 in the upper slot) and I could not find a way to change them (Maybe if I had the manuals...), So the enclosure I ended up using in the end (which is manufactured by http://www.chenbro.com.tw/en-us/) has very convenient dip switches in the back that allow you to set whatever SCSI IDs you want. Also the new enclosure is a bit smaller and the front bezel does not fight with it (like it did with the other). Overall I am highly satisfied of this hack. Not only now my Fuel resembles an Octane (with the same easy hot swappable disks) , but this enclosure has 3 slots instead of 2 and also these new drives are significantly faster than the older 68 pin drive I had in. I wish SGI had thought of this when they designed the Fuel instead of using that lame and messy mobile drives cage. Yeah well you'll object that now I have no room for a CDROM but you can still attach an external one for those few occasions you need one.

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - Irinikus - 05-15-2021

Neat mod!!!

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - jwhat - 05-16-2021

Hi roach-commuter & Irinikus,

yes nice to see such a clean and very practical mod.

Such a shame the Fuel does not provide more slots in front so you could use hot swap HD + have CD-ROOM/DVD-ROM and Tape drive.

Cheers from Oz,

jwhat/John.

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - Raion - 05-16-2021

SGIs do not to my knowledge support hotswap on their SCSI buses. I've never tried on my Origins or Tezro, because it'll certainly cause damage if it doesn't.

If you wanna potentially burn up a proprietary, nonfungible SCSI bus controller or backplane, that's your business...

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - roach-commuter - 05-16-2021

I just wanted to clarify that although the enclosure is meant for "hot-swappable" disks I am sure I would destroy my Fuel if I tried to pull a disk while it is on. So this mod is just meant to be for 'ease of access and replacement' not 'hot swappability' so to speak

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RE: Fuel and SCA80 disks - robespierre - 05-16-2021

Hot-swap capability has two aspects: electrical safety, and reconfiguration. They are independent.
The electrical safety requirement is satisfied by the SCA-2 connector. It is not possible to damage a drive or HBA when plugging this connector.
Reconfiguration is a question of software support for topology changes and updating internal tables. The scsiha(1M) command can be used to probe for changed devices.

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