Hard drive trays

[DavidJA]

Hi all,

I have a few Prolient 5500R's. (Xeon 450's).

I have noticed on Ebay that a few people are selling "68 pin scsi compaq hot swap hard disk trays" Compaq spare part #199880-001

Anyway, I'm thinking it would be nice to buy some of these and put my own SCSI drives in them, and therefor avoiding the 100% compaq tax.

My questions are:
Will this work? Do I need special SCSI drives? Will the result be 'hot plugable'? Is there any limit to the size of the HDDs I use?

Thank you in advance.

 

[jkallen]

I have seen others do this, but the SCSI drives you get from Compaq have some caching disabled on them. This would not be the case on yours and could cause problems. I wouldn' think it's worth it given the price of those SCSI-3 drives.

Compaq released an advisory in 1995 (sorry don't have the link, but it's called 877N) about this exact thing and said that customers could experience:

Data loss

False reports of pre-failure notification or no pre-failure notification

Potential safety hazard from access to components operating at hazardous energy levels

Equipment failures that may void the three-year warranty


I wouldn't reccomend it.