Conference mvblab::alphaserver_4100

610.0. "Is there is device size limit for Alphabios?" by CSC32::J_GAINES () Sat May 17 1997 20:33

    
    Raid5 disk drive on a swxrc-04 shows up as "unknown' from
    Alphabios.
    
    
    Question: Is there is device size limitation for the devices
    that can be seen by Alphabios on a Alpha 4100 system?
    
    
    System is a 4100 with ALPHABIOS at v5.28 from the 3.9 Alpha firmware
    cdrom.
    KZPSA at firmware A10. 
    The SWXRC-4 is at v2.7.
    Operating system is WNT ver 3.51
    
    The local Fs engr installed the SWXRC-04 and configured 2 raid 5 Raidsets
    D0 is a 24gb Raidset
    D1 is a 54gb Raidset
    
    
    During initialization the Alphabios sees the local scsi devices ok.
    It sees the KZPSA ok. Then is looks at the disk drives from the 
    SWXRC-04. It shows them up as:
    
   " device: disk scsi id0 DEC swxrc-04 v27z"  >>>>this is the 24gb raidset
   " device: unknown scsi id1 DEC swxrc-04 v27z" >>>this is the 54gb raidset
    
    If the FS engr selects the "display hardware" from the Alphabios
    menu the 24gb raidset shows up but the 54gb raidset doesnt even show
    up.
    
    When windowsNT is booted you can see the drives and FS engr was able to
    copy data from the 24gb raidset to the 54gb raidset ok...
    
    
    

    Need more info. What is a SWXCR-04 ?? If you are talking about KZPSC or
    KZPAC adapters, I have one in my system running version 2.42 F/W and
    V2.7 of the Raid Array utility. I have configured several RAID sets
    with no problem. In your note you mention that 54-GB RAID-5 unit in not
    showing up, I am assuming you have (6) 9-GB drives configured as RAID-5
    which will be reduced to 43390 MB size due to the parity. Furthermore,
    uder RCU utility you will not be able to define a logical drive
    greater than 32765-MB and that is the controller/FW limitation (that's
    what I have been seeing).
    
    In other words, if you have (6) 9-GB disks configured as RAID-5, the
    total storage size is 43390-MB. The first one can have the max. size of
    32765-MB, and the balance of 10625-MB has to be a configured as a seperate
    logical unit.
    
    Hope this helps.
    
    /Frank