DoN. Nichols <dnichols@d-and-d.com> wrote:

> When withdrawn, the drives do not give the typical inertial
> behavior of a spinning drive.

> I'm reluctant to bring the system down to the OBP level and run
> probe-scsi-all, because my wife will be using it (the Sun Fire 280R is
> our file server) even if I will be over at the console looking at the
> results of the probe-scsi-all.

> A search through google found at least one maker of PC boards
> for driving FC drives which offers a special card to go between the
> drive and the fc card to make a "12V Only" drive work when it otherwise
> will not work.


Well, might be time to send the better half out to the movies and check it
with the OBP but I still think you have a couple door stops.

Seagate appears to have buried or taken offline the white papers and
engineering stuff, but when this "12V only" subject came up before there was
a document they had available for the FC drives which broke down all the
options and variations in that line (guess its Cheetah, 10k, FC). There
wasn't a single one made that was 12V only, they all used the split 12v/5v
for power.

A while back I ran into the same thing, some ebay specials for 18GB's (which
were twice as expensive as what you paid for the 146GB, figure the timeline
out yourself) and they too had that sticker or imprint on the label.

We contacted the place they came from and they said (we took it with a grain
of salt) that they got them from a place that built disk cabinets which were
universal, sort of. They had their own internal non-standard bus and
supplied the appropiate carrier (spud bracket) to adapt whatever kind of
drive to it. So with minor changes to the back plane, the same cabinet could
be used for FC, scsi sca or plain old scsi drives.

The reason the drives were marked 12V because of this was some OTHER drives
made by maybe fujitsu or hitachi did in fact use 18 or 24v for the motor/arm
supply (still 5v for the logic) and those cabinets were not to be used with
the 12V drives.

Yes I know, it would make more sense to mark the cabinets "18V drives only"
but this is what they told us.

I don't know what you found on google about this adapter but my guess is
it's along the same lines. I'd say it's more likely there are some host
adapters out there that used it, not the other way around.

Anyway, the 18GB drives marked "12V only" worked just fine in a A5200
cabinet so I'd say they should work in the 280R as well.

If you don't think the motor is spinning up at all, that really is the kiss
of death I think. A bad firmware update can cause that but I never found a
way around it. Probably needs to go into a manufacturing mode using some
magic cable or secret combination of jumpers.

Still, I admit I can be wrong about all of this but after taking advantage
of several "ebay lots" over the past 6 or 7 years, I don't think so.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com