9740 Shows No Drives on Win2K

[GusJohnson]

We've got a Storagetek 9740 that my company bought at auction. I've never hooked one up, and it didn't come with *any* manuals; and, Storagetek's website is, frankly, unhelpful.

I pieced together that I needed a HVD SCSI card for the Compaq Proliant backup server that I'm installing it on and a HVD SCSI cable. We bought an ADAPTEC 2944UW SCSI adapter and found a spare EMC SAN SCSI cable.

I hooked it all up and installed the card and installed the Storagetek RSM Win2K driver for the changer.

The problem is that none of the *drives* are showing up in Device Manager under tape drives, and RSM kicks out errors about not being able to configure Changer0 every time the service starts. I can tell that there is communication with the 9740, because when it's not available and I start RSM services, it throws errors in the event log from Horizon about being unavailable. When I try to run the Win2k reskit RSMCONFG utility, it never detects tapes placed in the drives; I do, however see 10 drives with ??? in the registry key associated with RSM.

Physically, on the inside of the front of the box, there are 2 68 pin SCSI connectors, the top one is terminated and the bottom one is where I plug in my SCSI cable that goes to the backup server. If I look in the back of the 9740, I've got 10 DLT tape drives. On the back of every tape drive, there's 2 (left and right bottom) 68 pin SCSI connectors, and a serial connector on the top right. All the serial ports are plugged into cables coming in through the left side of the box. On the bottom two drives, there are no interconnecting (SCSI) cables of any kind, but I believe that there's a terminator on the left SCSI connector on the second one up. From the third one and on up in pairs (3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10),, the drives are connected: right side SCSI of the lower drive connects to left side SCSI on the one above it. There also a terminator on the left side SCSI of the lower one of each pair. In total, between these 10 drives, there are 4 cables.

My Adaptec card defaults to SCSI ID 7, the drives I set physically to 2-6 and 8-12, and I think the 9740 itself is on 0.

I'm wondering if the drive cabling sounds correct or if there's something else that seems obviously wrong. Also, where would I get new firmware for the 9740? And, if this is the correct configuration for daisy chained drives, can anyone explain anything about how the drives are actually connected? Thanks for any help you can provide.

-DLH

 

[TapeMan]

You need a connection from the SCSI library controller to the drives, but having 10 drives plus a robot on one SCSI bus is just asking for trouble.

It sounds like you drives are daisy-chained in pairs (reasonable), so with 10 drives you will need five SCSI bus adapters in the server. One bus can also drive the robot but in an ideal world it would go on a separate bus.

Tha manuals will give some more help with configuration.

 

[GusJohnson]

From what I've read on Storagetek, the RSM drivers require everything to be daisy chained. So, what you're saying is that the way it should be set up is that the SCSI connector with the terminator on the front of the box is actually supposed to be connected to the bottom drive and then they're daisy chained on up, whereas now they're chained in pairs but not connected to the robot? Maybe I shouldn't have all ten on there, but that would be the correct cable configuration for them to be chained together? Do I need a HVD cable to go from the robot to the first drive, or will regular SE LVD work?

 

[TapeMan]

You do not need the drives on the same SCSI bus as the library for RSM to see them. In device maanger you should be able to see the drives independently, RSM will report the drive status through the library interface. Each drive has a serial connection to the robotics which provides staus and control for the drives.
The drivers for DLT7000 should be in W2K.

Cable like this:-

With additional drives in a similar way but without the robot. Check the configuration on the LCD panel to ensure the library is correctly configured dor 10 drives.

--- --- --- ---
S | | | | | | |
E |-----| |---| |---| |---|
R | | | | | | |
V | --- --- ---
E | R D D
R | O R R
--- B I I
O V V
T E E

Hope this helps.

 

[Schotte]

You need one 2944 card (3949 HVD cards have two HVD channels!) per drive and each drive terminated correctly.
These drives can each need upto 40MB/Sec with compression, a 2944 (or half a 39´40) tops out at about 35MB/Sec, no matter what the manuals say.....
Keep cables to each a max of 20 meters.
Do not place more than one drive on one bus.
Win2K at the latest level.
4GB Memory or better.
2 x intel 2.6GHZ pr0cessoren or Alpha machine with OOOMMMPPPPHHHHH!
Local RAID system (fast) with data staging in both directions.

Sorry, but you may have bitten off more than you can chew here......

I would not recommend using more than two or so drives at a time as a Win2K machine is just incapable of sustaining streaming on many drives.Test and observe......these drives REALLY use & supply data at really high speeds.
Do not buy a Ferrari and use it to pull a caravan.......!