[bjames]

Anyone have experience setting up the 4 port ultra scsi xio option board?  I followed the installation manual I found online for irix7’s site and when I do a hinv or view the system overview from system manager it sees the additional scsi ports as expected.

I did the port mapping as required in the setup manual.

The only thing I don’t have is the software that supposably comes with the board.  The installation manual says to install the xio board, install the latest irix OS.  The install the media that came with the board.

The problem I’m having is when I connect drives to the “y” cables, the drives are not seen by irix.  The scsi ports are seen, but no devices connected.

I am wondering if I need to reinstall irix so that it can see the option board and install what ever drivers are needed... or do I need the install media that came with the board?

Any help is appreciated

[jan-jaap]

The XIO quad SCSI board is HVD (high voltage differential, not to be confused with LVD) SCSI. HVD SCSI is not compatible with SE/LVD SCSI.

IIRC it is possible to reconfigure the first channel to SE mode, but everything else is only HVD SCSI.

[bjames]

IIRC, the system reported back indicating the following

Port 1 = SE
Port 2 = Differential
Port 3 = Differential
Port 4 = SE... but I have to double check this.

I know the board supports both narrow and wide scsi devices on any port.

Where Im not confident is "If" i need to install additional software that may not be part of the Overlays or IRIX 6.5 base software.

[bjames]

So I educated myself about the differences between single ended SE and differential scsi signalling. The ultra scsi xio board provides 4 channels of differential fast 20 scsi. I also see that there are 2 variants of differential signalling: LVD low voltage differential and HVD high voltage differential.

The Medéa video raid RTS I will be using uses ultra 160 scsi which has LVD signalling. My current Medéa video raid that I have connected to the ultra scsi xio board is a Medéa RT which uses the ultra scsi 2 which is supposed to use the LVD signalling.

This medea raid RT is not seen on the scsi chain.

What is not mentioned in the sgi ultra scsi xio board manualis what ‘version’ of differential is compatible with the board.

The scsi wiki indicates LVD and HVD are not nessesarily compatible.

This has me confused... which differential drives actually work with this board?

[BrainStorm]

Actually, old SCSI gets a bit more confusing/interesting than even that. There was Fast SCSI, and Wide SCSI (different but same speed) and then there was Fast/Wide SCSI, Ultra SCSI (different but same speed), Ultra Wide and Ultra2 (different but same speed), etc., etc., and most are backward compatible but will cause all devices to run at the speed of the slowest device... Except complicate all of that by the Nth power.

I believe SE (single ended) is always LVD, but LVD can also loop like HVD. HVD bus can damage attached LVD drives. Am I still on the rails here? It has been quite a while...

Honestly, if you have U160 disks/array on a 20 MB/s controller, you'd be wasting a lot of time waiting for your data. Even Ultra2 would be running at quarter speed. My Octane2 has a PCI card cage with a Qlogic dual U160 SE card (IIRC) that runs two banks of 15k U160/U320 HDs in RAID0 for my overhead. It was pretty snappy compared to the rest of the system.

So, I guess what I'm trying to get at is, I think you'd be better trying to find a faster controller anyway, but you're going to have to go PCI to get it, based on what is available XIO vs. PCI. Shoebox or XIO-to-PCI adapter with a two channel U160 card would put your HDs/arrays running at 160 and 80 MB/s respectively.

---

Another thought...

The drives may not go backward far enough to be compatible, and thus not being recognized. Ultra (20) to U160 is quite a jump in terms of the protocols.

[BrainStorm]

I haven't had it up for a few years, but I believe I had it setup with striped array. As to whether it's available in IRIX as standard, or it had software added, I'm unsure. All I can attest to from memory at present is that is was software RAID. (I had A LOT of help from nekochan forums; circa 2005 ?)

This topic actually has me contemplating something. I have used the Compaq/HP SmartArray RAID controllers in my Evo workstations. I remember several times that I had to configure the card in a server, then the memory battery kept the config after it was installed in the workstation... I'm wondering if a configured SA5300/512 [Ultra160 2x internal, 4x external] would work in my Ocatne2. It would come down to IRIX recognizing the controller.

:huh: ...or...

[bjames]

Looks like I may have to look into the PCI uw160 scsi adapter instead.

Does anyone know if adaptec uw160 dual port scsi cards are compatible? Or do I have to get the QLogic SGI version for the PCI cage?