External SCSI w/ 2 tape drives? 1

[DebiJo]

I ordered an external 4mm tape drive to go in my P640. They sent an external card that comes up in lsdev as: Wide/Ultra-3 SCSI I/O Controller. It has 2 connections externally. It is not used for anything other than the 4mm tape drive, which works file.

My question is, can I put my LTO drive off the other connetion on the same card? I had an old tape drive hung off a large external SCSI differential card, but it won't recognize my new LTO drive. The new Wide/Ultra-3 does. Both tape drives would not be in use at the same time.

I'm only going to use the 4mm once/month during the day to do a mksysb. Where the LTO will be used every night. So, theoretically, I could unhook the 4mm, cfgmgr, hook up the LTO, cfgmgr again and use the LTO.... RIGHT? Then reverse the process when I need the 4mm again. This is just our development box, so I'm not too worred about the frequency of the cfgmgr's.

Thanks in advance
Debi
AIX 5.1

 

[DukeSSD]

If it is a dual port card, just plug one into each port.
If you have the right cables you could daisy chain them on 1 port but if you ever need to copy from one drive to the other then one on each port would be better.
I hope you realise these cards and drives should not be Hot Plugged! You should shutdown and power off all devices and the server before plugging / unplugging any SCSI device that is not in a Hot Swap backplane i.e. a hot swap disk, unless you can power off the card from the Diag, Task Selection, Hot Swap Manager.
There is a real danger of back emf when you plug / unplug a device which could / will damage the device or adapter, they might not break straight away but it will shorten their life.

 

[DebiJo]

Thank you DukeSSD! Worked like a charm.

Debi