Thanks everyone! We attached the shelf to a Linux host and are able to see all 14 disks. CentOS is detecting them oddly, so we’re still working through the details. I’ll report back with when we get this working!

 

 

I imagine you could do the reverse of this hack to change from the NTAP 520 byte format to 512 byte format:

http://www.liveinternet.ru/users/vardomskiy/post127616861/

I've never tried either, so your mileage may vary.


-----Original Message-----
From: toasters-bounces@teaparty.net on behalf of John Stoffel
Sent: Fri 1/6/2012 1:06 PM
To: Don Elmore
Cc: toasters@teaparty.net
Subject: Re: DS14MK4 as DAS


Don> Apologies if this has been asked before.  We have a DS14MK4 shelf
Don> with 144G FC disks and 2 ESH4 modules that's no longer in
Don> production. I've heard of people using these shelves as
Don> direct-attached storage (no filer head, just directly cabled to a
Don> host), but I haven't been able to pull up any details after
Don> searching online. I figure if anybody has tried something this
Don> silly, they're probably on this mailing list :)

Don> Has anybody been able to get this to work? Any tips/tricks?

I tried to do something like this about two years ago with a SunBlade
100 running Solaris 10, maybe 9, and using ZFS.  Never got it to work
reliably for whatever reason, and gave up.  I was probably using a
DS14mk2 though, so who knows.

As I recall, the biggest issue was the 520 byte sectors the Netapp
drives come with, instead of the expected 512 byte sectors that most
drives use natively.  I seem to recall there was a trick you could use
to make it work, but the hardware is gone so I can look it up.

Sorry,
John
    John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group
  Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec
             john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087
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