Someone has suggested to me that the largest disk that can be fitted to a
StorEdge A5000 FC AL 14-bay disk array is 36.4 GB. Can anyone confirm
this, or is this limit based on the largest disk available at the time the
A5000 was sold?

I've found with a lot of older Sun equipment that the maximum SCSI disk
size quoted in the specs is historical and that you can in fact fit the
largest disks available today (in most cases).

Andy

Hey,

max. disk size is 36.4 GB. The only difference is some disks
are 1" and sone 1.6", so you will have some space in the
drive bays.

Klaus Grote
DNS GmbH

In article <Pine.LNX.4.63.0605180456220.27080@anahata.ma.ic.a c.uk>,
andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> writes:
> Someone has suggested to me that the largest disk that can be fitted to a
> StorEdge A5000 FC AL 14-bay disk array is 36.4 GB. Can anyone confirm
> this, or is this limit based on the largest disk available at the time the
> A5000 was sold?

I've got some 72G (1 inch, even) drives in one here.

> I've found with a lot of older Sun equipment that the maximum SCSI disk
> size quoted in the specs is historical and that you can in fact fit the
> largest disks available today (in most cases).

Mostly. Sun will tell you what's supported, which tends to be a
restricted list. Quite a lot of larger/newer drives will work, and
that's fine if you're not bothered about support.

--
-Peter Tribble
L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/

andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> wrote:
: Someone has suggested to me that the largest disk that can be fitted to a
: StorEdge A5000 FC AL 14-bay disk array is 36.4 GB. Can anyone confirm
: this, or is this limit based on the largest disk available at the time the
: A5000 was sold?

: I've found with a lot of older Sun equipment that the maximum SCSI disk
: size quoted in the specs is historical and that you can in fact fit the
: largest disks available today (in most cases).

Probably true, that last statement.

We have a few A5200's with 73GB's in them (seagate st373405fc), not even sun
branded and they work fine. Firmware revisions should match though, even on
smaller drive capacities.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com

On Thu, 18 May 2006, Peter Tribble wrote:

> In article <Pine.LNX.4.63.0605180456220.27080@anahata.ma.ic.a c.uk>,
> andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> writes:
>> Someone has suggested to me that the largest disk that can be fitted to a
>> StorEdge A5000 FC AL 14-bay disk array is 36.4 GB. Can anyone confirm
>> this, or is this limit based on the largest disk available at the time the
>> A5000 was sold?
>
> I've got some 72G (1 inch, even) drives in one here.

That's good news, I'll buy a secondhand one and see. Perhaps even 146 GB
will work.

>> I've found with a lot of older Sun equipment that the maximum SCSI disk
>> size quoted in the specs is historical and that you can in fact fit the
>> largest disks available today (in most cases).
>
> Mostly. Sun will tell you what's supported, which tends to be a
> restricted list. Quite a lot of larger/newer drives will work, and
> that's fine if you're not bothered about support.

I've an E150 with 12 x 300 GB disks - the original spec for this elderly
server was 9.1 GB maximum :-)

Andy

On Thu, 18 May 2006, Peter Tribble wrote:

> In article <Pine.LNX.4.63.0605180456220.27080@anahata.ma.ic.a c.uk>,
> andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> writes:
>> Someone has suggested to me that the largest disk that can be fitted to a
>> StorEdge A5000 FC AL 14-bay disk array is 36.4 GB. Can anyone confirm
>> this, or is this limit based on the largest disk available at the time the
>> A5000 was sold?
>
> I've got some 72G (1 inch, even) drives in one here.

It is the A5000 that you have, and not the A5200?

Andy

In article <Pine.LNX.4.63.0605181607220.27751@anahata.ma.ic.a c.uk>,
andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> writes:
> On Thu, 18 May 2006, Peter Tribble wrote:
>
>> Mostly. Sun will tell you what's supported, which tends to be a
>> restricted list. Quite a lot of larger/newer drives will work, and
>> that's fine if you're not bothered about support.
>
> I've an E150 with 12 x 300 GB disks - the original spec for this elderly
> server was 9.1 GB maximum :-)

Ouch!

I remember years ago swapping all the original 2.1G drives in an E150
for 4.2G. At the time, that seemed a major step.

Where I have had problems is trying to put old disks into newer
machines. Particularly on SCSI busses capable of UltraSCSI speeds. Some
older drives think they can cut it so they try and operate at the
higher speed, but really can't and that can cause all sorts of
problems.

--
-Peter Tribble
L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/

In article <Pine.LNX.4.63.0605181658010.27751@anahata.ma.ic.a c.uk>,
andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> writes:
> On Thu, 18 May 2006, Peter Tribble wrote:
>
>> In article <Pine.LNX.4.63.0605180456220.27080@anahata.ma.ic.a c.uk>,
>> andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> writes:
>>> Someone has suggested to me that the largest disk that can be fitted to a
>>> StorEdge A5000 FC AL 14-bay disk array is 36.4 GB. Can anyone confirm
>>> this, or is this limit based on the largest disk available at the time the
>>> A5000 was sold?
>>
>> I've got some 72G (1 inch, even) drives in one here.
>
> It is the A5000 that you have, and not the A5200?

Says "Sun Enterprise Network Array" on the front. Which I think makes
it an A5000 before the A5000 existed as a name. Most of the drives in
it are 9G, which I think also marks it as an original A5000.

--
-Peter Tribble
L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/

andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> writes:

>On Thu, 18 May 2006, Peter Tribble wrote:

>> In article <Pine.LNX.4.63.0605180456220.27080@anahata.ma.ic.a c.uk>,
>> andy thomas <andy@ic.ac.uk> writes:
>>> Someone has suggested to me that the largest disk that can be fitted to a
>>> StorEdge A5000 FC AL 14-bay disk array is 36.4 GB. Can anyone confirm
>>> this, or is this limit based on the largest disk available at the time the
>>> A5000 was sold?
>>
>> I've got some 72G (1 inch, even) drives in one here.

>That's good news, I'll buy a secondhand one and see. Perhaps even 146 GB
>will work.

Not to be raining on peoples parade here but we've had a *lot* of
problems getting 36GB Seagate Cheetah's (ST136403FC) working inside
a number of Sun A5000 cabinets - even with Suns latest firmware.

It would look like things was working as long as we only accessed a
single drive at a time - but as soon as we started loading the system
with I/O the drives would start to time out and go on/off the FC bus(es)
all the time. It was horrible. We tried a *lot* of different things to try
to get things to work:

Tried different HBAs (both Sun and JNI)
Tried different fibre cables
Tried different GBICs
Tried with only a few disks per A5000
Tried various patches/hacks.
Tried various firmware levels on the disks (including the lastest
one available from Sun)

We finally had to remove all the 36GB disks and go back to the original
9GB and 18GB Seagate Barracudas. The boxes has been running smoothly
since then.

Mind you - this was with the A5000 model - it might work better with
A5100 and/or A5200 units - and/or other disks. Anyone got some
*other* FC JBOD box just sitting on a shelf that can take
full-height FC drives? :-)

(We use a couple of those (many) 36GB FC disks as boot disks in
a couple of Sun Blade1000 workstations whose boot disks died).

Exactly why it didn't work I never figured out. One hypothesis I had
was that the disks didn't like to be sitting on the same bus as the
management unit in the A5000. It apparently wasn't loading related as we
had the same problems if we only had like three disks in a unit or if
the units were fully loaded.

- Peter

--
--
Peter Eriksson <peter@ifm.liu.se> Phone: +46 13 28 2786
Computer Systems Manager/BOFH Cell/GSM: +46 705 18 2786
Physics Department, Linköping University Room: Building F, F203