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Department of Genetics

 

From Jan 2011. Includes pin-outs for v20z power connector.

So, I have a couple of old Sun v20z 1U servers. They've got a nice lot of memory in them; 8 gig each, which is quite a lot now, but even more impressive as they're 5 years old.

I wanted to use one of them to run my tape storage, but I also wanted a nice big pool of disk to spool data onto before writing it out to LTO4. I have some 150GB SCA-2 SCSI drives, and new ones are very expensive and I'm doing this basically on no budget at all. The plan:

  1. Put in an old 3ware SATA RAID card - works
  2. Remove the SCA backplane - a bit fiddly. The system doesn't seem to miss it.
  3. Discover the pin-out for the power connector - A 5x1 way keyed molex mini-fit type (like the ATX connectors.) Seems to be G, +5, ?, +12, G
  4. Wire up a SATA power cable - Have taken apart the ATX connector from an old power supply.
  5. Take the old internal SCSI to the back plate to run the tape library - Will have to buy something :(
  6. Put it all together and hope. Unfortunately there are bits of metal in the way of the SATA power connectors. Will have to modify the old disk caddies to give a bit more space.

It eventually all fit together but there was a fault in the 3ware SATA raid controller which caused intermittent dire sounding warning messages. It seems to have problems with either dual CPUs or AMD Opteron CPUs. I'll have to make do with the smaller SCSI disks.