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Rich M
Asked: 2017-10-19 02:32:19 +0800 CST

Reconnecting SAS equipment

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I need to reconfigure the cabling between some LTO tape drives and a server. Are they plug and play or do I need to do any configuration?
From what I've read so far, it seems that recycling the power on the server and the drives should be enough.
We have an HP 1/8 G2 Autoloader, 2x LTO-6 drives, a SAS fanout cable and a ProLiant with an LSI Adapter SAS 3000 8-port with 1068E card. Curently the fanout cable is being used to connect the two LTO-6 drives to another server but I want to repurpose it to connect the Autoloader AND the the two LTO's to the ProLiant.
Any advice please?

hp-proliant

3 Answers

  1. Without knowing which exact controllers and software you use, this cannot be answered. Most hard- and software is able to find a device that has moved to another port but there is no guarantee unless the documentation explicitly says so - which is pretty rare unfortunately.

    SAS devices have unique world-wide names (WWN) that unambiguously identify them, no matter where and how they are connected. SATA drives may also be uniquely identified by their serial number or by metadata written by the array controller, but this is not be taken for granted.

    If you want to repurpose hardware (without needing to retain HDD data) you can just replug them. The autoloaders may need some drivers to be installed but unless the new port/link is explicitly disabled in the controller configuration they should be seen right away.

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  2. They are plug and play in the situation you're describing. External SAS tape drives can be disconnected/reconnected hot, without a poweroff.

    The drivers are in your OS, and should not require any additional work.

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  3. All devices appear to be plug-and-play. Powering off the tape drives, moving and powering back on was sufficient.

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