I recently bought an used Netfinity 6000R (8682-1RY) server. It came with an Adaptec AIC-7899 SCSI Controller and an IBM ServeRaid Controller.
When I first started the machine up, it seemed that the included SCSI Drive (IBM Ultrastar DDYS-T36950 LVM) was faulty because it did neither work on the Adaptec or ServeRaid controller. I tried different jumper settings (namely FORCE SE) to make sure it isn’t a configuration issue, but the drive always timed out.
I then ordered two IBM DRHS-36D drives, but they did show similar symptoms. The Power LED on the Drive Backplane shortly lights up. When I attached one of the two DRHS-36D drives to the adaptec controller, I could remove the drive when the controller’s scan did hang and access the Adaptec’s BIOS, and even do a block test so I don’t believe that the drives are faulty at all. Sometimes the drives spin up, sometimes they don’t, and when I removed the drive during the Adapter’s scan (before entering the SCSIselect utility with Ctrl+A), it did spin up correctly when doing the block test in SCSIselect.
I think that either both cables are defective, or that the HDD Backplane is faulty. As I do have no knowledge about IBM’s technology and as I don’t have any other hardware to test this on, I wonder what I should do next.
I read alot of stuff regarding LVM, and some people say that the end of the SCSI chain must be terminated – but I guess this was done by IBM on the HDD backplanes. Another post was saying that some PSU are unable to power the drives (the original drive has 750mA at 5V, 1100mA at 12V and the replacement drives have both 1.10A at 5V and 1.15A at 12V).
regards,
Timo