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USB to Fibre converter
- Thread starter TechyG
- Start date
Some CE's who need to test fibre tape drives or whatever are issued with a PCI box which plugs into your laptop expansion slot. It extends the PCI bus of your laptop so you can fit external cards.
The smallest of these units takes a single FC or SCSI card which you have to supply yourself.
The smallest of these units takes a single FC or SCSI card which you have to supply yourself.
- Thread starter
- #3
I’ve provided this update in case your manager is like our manager and won’t spend any money.
Some types of drive (such as the 9940B) are easy damaged when shipping, even though the head lock is on and they are well packaged, so we wanted to equip our large tape accounts with test beds to thoroughly checks drives onsite to eliminate “no fault founds” back at our repair centre.
I looked into the Magma box myself, and although it’s a good product, we decided not to go down that route for the following reasons.
1 They are expensive, especially the two slot ones
2 Our CE laptops run XP. You need 2003 server for the FC card drivers.
We ended up utilising small form factor HP/Compaq PC’s that were being retired by our IT department. We installed 2003 and fitted 1x FC and 1x SCSI card. They do the job brilliantly. Windows Backup is all the test software you need, but if you have something like SCSI toolbox then all the better.
The next batch of test beds we put together was even simpler. We used some Sun Ultra 10’s a customer was chucking out. Once you add a FC card you are off and running as Solaris has built in support for tape drives. We wrote a shell script that asks you a few questions like how many GB you want to write and then it tar’s that many GB to the drive.
In all cases we remove the suspect drives from the customer’s library and check them on the CE’s workbench, where the test beds are. If you really have to check them in-situ in the computer room them maybe you want to consider the Magma box, but you will want a dedicated laptop running Server 2003.
Some types of drive (such as the 9940B) are easy damaged when shipping, even though the head lock is on and they are well packaged, so we wanted to equip our large tape accounts with test beds to thoroughly checks drives onsite to eliminate “no fault founds” back at our repair centre.
I looked into the Magma box myself, and although it’s a good product, we decided not to go down that route for the following reasons.
1 They are expensive, especially the two slot ones
2 Our CE laptops run XP. You need 2003 server for the FC card drivers.
We ended up utilising small form factor HP/Compaq PC’s that were being retired by our IT department. We installed 2003 and fitted 1x FC and 1x SCSI card. They do the job brilliantly. Windows Backup is all the test software you need, but if you have something like SCSI toolbox then all the better.
The next batch of test beds we put together was even simpler. We used some Sun Ultra 10’s a customer was chucking out. Once you add a FC card you are off and running as Solaris has built in support for tape drives. We wrote a shell script that asks you a few questions like how many GB you want to write and then it tar’s that many GB to the drive.
In all cases we remove the suspect drives from the customer’s library and check them on the CE’s workbench, where the test beds are. If you really have to check them in-situ in the computer room them maybe you want to consider the Magma box, but you will want a dedicated laptop running Server 2003.
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