How to make IDE drives serve your 3000
August 3, 2007
Whether you are managing a migration shop, and keeping 3000 costs down until shutdown, or homesteading independently and indefinitely, HP 3000 guru Stan Sieler has discovered a process to make cheap IDE drives work with HP 3000 servers.
These drives come as cheap as $99 new, a tiny fraction of the price of HP-certified storage devices for the HP 3000. But as the community has debated in the past, HP's standards ensure greater reliability, but at a increased cost per gigabyte that can be hard to justify in a Transition world.
The key to Sieler's connection between SCSI ports on the 3000 and IDE is the Acard AEC-7720U Ultra SCSI-to-IDE Bridge, a device that Sieler bought on eBay for $30 plus shipping. The Acard has been on the market for at least four years; more information is available at the company's Web site.
Sieler reported, "I installed a Maxtor 120 GB IDE disk drive (probably 3 to 5 years old) on an HP 3000/918."
I took the Maxtor drive, plugged in the SCSI/IDE adapter, selected a SCSI ID (I probably could have made it cable select, but I didn’t have the time), put the combo into a spare external drive box, plugged in the SCSI cable and a power cable (it was a special power cable that splits the normal plower into two connectors, the normal (crappy) connector that I hate, and a smaller connector to power the adapter.
"I added the box onto a 918, sysgen'ed it in, rebooted, and voila!" He filled us in on the details of mapping the drive into the HP 3000's registry of peripherals:
SYSGEN is used to build (and display) an I/O configuration, and makes no requirement that it matches reality. The only oddity I’ve encountered so far is that the initial “DOIONOW” didn’t notice that the drive was present ... but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that that has happened on standard SCSI drives from time to time, given the amount of user testing DOIONOW probably doesn’t get.
SYSGEN followed by DOIONOW failed to see the drive. I shut down the 3000, power cycled it, brought it up to below the ISL prompt, and did a "search" command, and it saw the drive!
Chronologically:
- I ran SYSGEN and added the drive in as LDEV 2 (small system :) powered it on, and then did a “DOIONOW” (after confirming that the commands in LOG4ONLN.PUB.SYS were correct, of course ... I’ve often seen stale date in that file). The I/O configuration change worked (in that LDEV 2 was now configured), but MPE didn’t realize that the drive was spinning.
(I didn’t think to power cycle the drive at this point ... that may have worked and let me avoid the reboot)
- I shutdown the system
- I started the bootup, interrupted it so I could interact with the PDC (“below the ISL”) ... (that’s where you’d normally type the “BOOT PRI” command to boot into the ISL)
- I typed “SEA” (for “search”), and it found the drive and reported it as a Maxtor drive with firmware revsion “YAR4”.
- I did a “BOOT PRI”, and said “yes, I want to interact” (that got me to the ISL prompt)
- At the ISL> prompt, I entered: ODE MAPPER at the MAPPER prompt, I entered: RUN
That displayed a map of the I/O devices (and memory/CPU) on the system:
Type HW SW Revisions
Path Component Name ID Mod Mod Hdwr Firm
---------- ----------------------------- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
...
56/52 HP-PB SCSI 4H 14H 39H 0 0
56/52.0.0 HPC1504(X)/HPC1521B DDS tape - - - - T503
56/52.5.0 Maxtor 6 Y120P0 - - - - YAR4
56/52.6.0 HPC2490AM disk drive - - - - 5193
At this point, I could have chosen to use some other ODE utilities
to explore the disk drive, but I felt it wouldn’t be worth the time.
(Normally, if the drive appears in a SEA command, it’s cabled
correctly and working.)
- I exited MAPPER, and got back to the ISL> prompt.
- I did a “START NORECOVERY”
- When the system came up, it saw LDEV 2 (and gave the usual misleading message (bug :) about it being a duplicate of some other drive ... this almost always happens when MPE tries to do volume recognition on a non-MPE disk, and can be ignored in this case).
- I used DEBUG to confirm that I could read the drive:
(logon as MANAGER.SYS, or some user with PM capability)
:debug
dsec 2.0, 40, b
c
- I used VOLUTIL to initialize the disk and create a volume set:
:volutil
newset maxtor, maxtor1, 2
(this results in a drive with permanent and transient limits set
to 100%)
exit
- I created a group on the new disk:
:newacct test, mgr
:newacct test, mgr; onvs=maxtor
:altgroup pub.test; homevs=maxtor
- I restored a database onto it:
(on a different machine)
:store @.pub.test
(on the machine with the Maxtor IDE drive)
:restore ;;show;olddate;keep
Voila! I now had my 5 GB database on my 120 GB Maxtor drive!
It’s available as a normal retail item, but is somewhat hard to find (not a lot of call for SCSI compared to standard PC and even Mac items.
This adapter has been on the market since at least 2003 (based on the date on the manual).