Andrew, Network Appliance recommends against hot-plugging of SCSI tape and library devices. The 68-pin connector is not defined as a hot-plug connector and does not provide electrical safety for either the adapter or the device. Most of the time, a hot-plug won't hurt anything, but on occasion you'll blow a transceiver.

The SCA connector used on disk drives is designed to assure a square connection with ground mating occurring first. The 68-pin connector on tape drives is not so designed.

Steve

-----Original Message----- From: Andrew Toon [mailto:andrew.toon@tracegroup.com] Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2001 3:58 AM To: 'Paul Letta' Cc: 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: RE: Direct attaching SCSI tape drives to 760's

I have had to remove a d6irectly attached tape drive a few time on my F740. It hasn't caused any problems. However when I attach a new drive it will only recognise it if I do a reboot. I don't know if there's something similar to the Solaris "drvconfig" command but if not it would be a great feature to have.

Andrew Toon Technical Services Manager Trace Computers Plc

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Letta [ mailto:letta@jlab.org mailto:letta@jlab.org ] Sent: 07 August 2001 17:18 To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Direct attaching SCSI tape drives to 760's

Does anybody have any comments in regard to direct attaching SCSI drives 760's ? My concern is what happens when the drives fail ? I seem to have a drive failure rate of 3 or 4 a year. Currently I do not direct attach, so replacing them is no problem. But what happens to the filers when you remove a SCSI tape device hot ? Can you reattach a new one without rebooting the filer ? I do not think my environment would stand for a filer reboot each time a tape drive fails, but I really do not want to live with the 4MB/Sec I get for backups over the network now.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Paul

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