615 pSeries and what SCSI drives can one use with them?

[gwichman]

My IBM reseller is quoting my a list price of $2395 for a single 75GB SCSI drive for a 615 pSeries. I about choked when i heard that considering an IBM 146GB SCSI drive can be had for as little as $740 through any third party vendor.

Question is, do those or any other hard drives work with a pSeries or are the proprietary in some way (IBM messed with the pin-outs)?

Is it possible to buy the pSeries 615, a bunch of 146GB drives from a third party vendor, get the drive trays for the pSeries (empty), bolt the drives to the empty trays, and save a bucketload of money?

Anyone done this or looked into it? Any hard drive vendors listening?

 

[Morsing]

They might work!! (That's what IBM says which means they haven't tested it)

It's not supported by IBM and the other disks doesn't have the full command set that RS6000 IBM drives have. The cheap drives are not designed for the pSeries.

Also there might be a heating problem with 146GB size disks, so check with IBM about warrenty.

I wouldn't recommend doing it. Pseries is more expensive hardware but a lot more stable. It would be stupid to pay a lot of money on the computer and then put unstable disks in it.

Cheers

Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[aix001]

Hallo,

the problem is that the IBM Drive has an other firmware, so that the maschine can boot from this device. Possibly this feature ins't given with any other Tape-Drive.