Kevin Brosius on Thu, 23 May 2002 09:40:10 -0400


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [PLUG] AS/400 update


"W. Chris Shank" wrote:
> 
> So I picked up a free AS/400 yesterday (and boy is my back killing me -
> badda boom!) I couldn't find any information about what it would be useful
> for outside of running OS/400, so I decided to strip out the disks.
> 
> The results were: 3 9.1Gb 7200RPM LVD UW SCSI drives, 1 20X SCSI CDROM, and
> 1 QIC 2GB SCSI tape drive (and about 4 dozen tapes), and a large UPS.
> 
> Also, the disk drive housing is removable. It seems to be a SCSI backplane
> (the drives plug into it) and holds up to 5 disks. I don't think the
> backplane does any hardware raid, but I'm pretty sure the AS/400 had a raid
> configuration since the original owners said it had a total capacity of 18G.
> Anyone know what other tail-tell signs of hardware would be? There is a PCI
> card that the SCSI cables are fed from, but this card is mostly blank -
> meaning there are very little electronics on it. And wouldn't a hardware
> raid want all the disks on seperate cables? or would that only be for high
> throughput (which is how i'd like to use the disks)?
> 
> Anyway - if anyone knows anything about any of this hardware or can point me
> to some more resources (IMB doesn't give up much data on it) - please let me
> know.
> 
> thanks!
> -Chris


Sounds almost like an SCA SCSI setup.  Are the drives in trays that look
like they might be hot-pluggable (with a single connector for power &
scsi)?  I've been playing with a 4 drive sca setup, and they usually
have some kind of interface board, like you describe, to split scsi out
for all the drives and combine the power signals into one
connector/cable per drive.

On the system I worked with, the drive controller decides if you do raid
or not.  It was a Mylex interface, and you could take all the drives
attached to it and configure them just about any way you want.  They
could then end up as 4 individual logical drives, or all they way up to
raid 0,1,5, etc...  So that part depends on the scsi controller they are
attached to (or even software, in the case of software raid.)

-- 
Kevin Brosius

______________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group       -      http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements-http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  -  http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug