Good news / bad news

...but it was a near thing. Once again post.fi manages to forget to notify me that a parcel has arrived. I just managed to remember to go pick it up on the seventh day it had been sitting at the post office (rumor has it that they send them back after 7 days now).

Going back in time a bit, I managed to find a reasonably priced LTO-4 drive auction on ebay in an external enclosure including complete mounting rails AND a suitable cable (SFF-8088 connectors). I order it and forget about it for half a month.

I finally get it and leave it on my table for a few days, planning to install it over the weekend, being busy with having more frequent migraines than I usually do I wasn't looking too carefully at it.

Once I finally got to installing it, I note with pleasure that the mounting rails seem to be of excellent quality, easy to use and a snap to install which is always nice, and while fiddling with them for a bit (the guys that sold me the drive apparently dismounted them from the case and placed the half of the rails that is normally stuck to the case in the rails backwards) I glance at the drive dust cover door thing and it says...

Ultrium 5.

I had been sold an LTO-5 tape drive at the price of an LTO-4 drive.

Score.

But then the bad news, I am not very familiar with SAS yet and the various gotchas that inevitably come with enterprise gear. Turns out the embedded SAS controller in my SuperMicro 2026 (A OEM branded LSI 2108) is only able to operate in RAID mode, it can't pass through disks or tape drives to the operating system. It sees the tape drive just fine (and the device type still is "Ultrium 5" so it wasn't just that someone had replaced the door), but refuses to do anything with it.

Rats.

I spent some time fiddilng with the RAID BIOS, but to no avail, it would let me verify that JBOD mode was disabled and not accept MegaCli -AdpSetProp enablejbod -a0 with any ordering of the parameters. The graphical configuration was likewise unwilling to cooperate.

So in the end I have a much nicer tape drive than I expected, that I can't use.

Going forward, I think I will have to find a non-RAID SAS controller that is supported by the mfii(4) driver after all.

Staffan