SMD controllers on 4D/240

[Andrew Hume]

In article <1989Dec18.113838.27875 at hellgate.utah.edu>, mjb%hoosier.utah.edu at cs.utah.edu (Mark Bradakis) writes:
> We have a 4D/240gtx and we are interested in putting some SMD disks on it.
> Does anyone have any good or bad comments about doing this?  What controllers,
> and how much do they cost?  How is the IO throughput?  I imagine that a fast
> machine like the 240gtx should really have no trouble with several gigabytes
> of disk hanging off the thing.


we have a 4d/240 that came with one 1.2GB smd disk on a xylogics controller.
we thought to upgrade the system ourselves by buying our own disks
(i should point out at&t has serious volume discounts with imprimis.)
so we bought the cables from sgi, the disks from imprimis (sabre)
and installed them into the disk farm. before i got around
to formatting them, we installed 3.2.
	so i tried to format the new three drives. one formatted okay,
the others failed (too many succesive errors). (in passing, i scrogged
several inodes on my system disk because fx causes the controller to reset
and it looked like we lost an inode or two every time that happened.
thereafter, i did this fx stuff standalone despite what the hotline says.)
i mkfs'ed, fsck'ed and mounted filesystems on the new disk and very soon
had a console full of hard ecc errors.
	having no fear and feeling no pain, i called the hotline.
they very soon said that if i wanted to use third party stuff that was my
problem. i said, well that's okay but at least you should tell me what
firmware revision the controller, disks etc should be (after all,
i had duplicated the hardware sgi sells). hotline agreed and called back
sometime later. this time, hotline was apologetic and polite and said
sgi doesn't do anything to the drives anyway and since we had a full
maintenance contract, hotline would help. well, they still didn't have the
revision numbers but i said i would try reseating all the cables etc
and checking all the dip switches were the same etc.
	a few days later, no hotline callback so i tried imprimis.
i got hold of their smd specialist and said i had problems with
sabres on an sgi box. he said, 'hmmm', i heard pages flicking
and then he said 'yeah, a lot of that starting around september'.
well to cut an already long story short, this was a known problem
with three causes: a tiny fraction was due to a bad prom on the sabres
(long fixed), a bunch more problems were due to fx (these were
supposedly fixed in 3.2) and the rest were due to controller problems.
so i called the hotline and they asked 'well, how are things?'.
i replied that i knew what the problem was and relayed the news from
the imprimis guy. the hotline guy said he knew about all of that
(sure! why didn't he tell e before?). he then said we needed
firmware revision 2.6.2 or later on the xylogics controller.
i had already pulle dthe board to find we had 2.6 and so we quickly agreed
for a new board to be fedex'ed to us.
	i just formatted one of the new drives today. no problems
(although it has not been soaked).

	i was not satisfied with how the hotline handled this but at least now
my disks seem like they are working.