[SunRescue] disks for SPARCstarage array

[Bjrn Ramqvist]

P Nutton wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Can anyone tell me which disks will fit in a SPARCstorage array 100?

Every 1" high SCA-drive upto 9GB.

> I have 3 of them, with 30 disks each, currently a mixture of
> 
> SUN1.05G Conner
> SUN2.1G Seagate ST32550WC
> 
> I believe the C stands for center, as these disks have the 68 ribbon
> connector in the center of the end, rather than off to one side.
> I also believe that I need 1" low profile (LP) disks as I have 9 Gb
> ST19171WC drives in an RSM2000 which are 1.6" high and would not fit,
> although the connector is in the right place.

The "C" on the Seagate-drives stand for "SCA" host connector.
I think this is the most accurate URL describing this feature;
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/sca.html

And you're right. You need 1" high disks, as 1.6" high disks would
render some connectors useless due to space constraints.

> I would like to start replacing disks as they fail with 4 or 9 Gb drives,
> any advice from someone who has done this already would be nice. Will I cook
> the unit with 9 Gb drives?

You will certainly not fry your array with 9GB drives. Newer drives,
even the second-generation 10,000rpm ones, keep a remarkably low
temperature. Even if you put older (1" high though) 9GB drives in there,
there shouldn't be a problem if you keep you array in a standard cooled
computer enviroment.
(I successfully ran a 10,000rpm drive in my SS5 during a 24h event, in a
standard office enviroment.)

One side-note;
the array can't make use of drives bigger than 8.4GB, so you are pretty
much wasting space with 18GB drives if you even consider that. (A Sun
field-technician to me that) It's fair enough to put 7,200rpm and
10,000rpm drives in there since these have much lower access time,
usually down to 5-7.5 ms.
Remeber that these arrays have 6 seperate Fast-Wide SCSI-channel
distributed among the 30 drive connectors, so try to change 6 drives at
a time to distribute the workload if you use striping.

+-----+ +-----+ +-----+             +-----+ +-----+ +-----+
|     | |     | |     |             | 9GB | | 9GB | | 9GB |
| ch1 | | ch3 | | ch5 |             | 2GB | | 2GB | | 2GB |
|     | |     | |     |             |     | |     | |     |
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+             +-----+ +-----+ +-----+
|     | |     | |     |             | 9GB | | 9GB | | 9GB |
| ch2 | | ch4 | | ch6 |             | 2GB | | 2GB | | 2GB |
|     | |     | |     |             |     | |     | |     |
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+             +-----+ +-----+ +-----+
  ^ front of array ^                  ^ front of array ^

> I use them attached to a 1000E as a disk farm for PC backup.
> 
> Great list, I have been lurking for a month now and used info off the list a
> half dozen times already.

I don't know how many times I've have had use for this list... probably
too many to count. :-)


Greg, feel free to take notes into the HW-ref


	/Bjorn