Savvio, Cheetah, and Constellation Enterprise Server & Storage (SCSI/FC/SAS/SATA) drives

[Kretov]

I have got an old SCSI HDD - Quantum Fireball 1280 and need to connect it to my SCSI controller. The problem is that the controller being used does not detect SCSI devices if they have parity enabled. Usually, it is possible to disable parity with a jumper. However, 1280s drive has only software control of SCSI parity. And is is ON by default. That is what is written in the 1280s description at stason.org:

"In addition to the hardware jumpers listed above, the Quantum Fire-
ball 640/1280S hard disk drive supports software control of SCSI ID,
Parity Enable, Wait Spin as determined by Mode Page 29h. Plug-and-
play SCSI is also supported."

First, I tried to find some specific utilities for Quantum HDD configuration, but with no success.

Then I used SDPARM command line utility to inspect SCSI mode pages of the HDD. It appeared that page #29h is missing, however there are two other vendor-specific pages: 9 and 39h. Here is the dump:

PG09: 89-0E-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-01-04

PG39: B9-06-10-00-00-00-00-00

Unfortunately, I have no idea where the parity info is located in these structures. but I am able to change different bits of these mode pages using SDPARAM utility.

Does anyone know where the parity is on these mode pages? Of course, I can set all bits with zeroes, but I am afraid that device won't start after it.

Or perhaps, special utilities for Quantum that will show this vendor-specific information in human-friendly way DO exist?

I would be grateful for any clues how to turn the parity off.

[fzabkar · Accepted solution]

Section 6.8.13 of the manual discusses the MODE SENSE command, but it doesn't provide the information you need. :-(

Quantum Fireball 1280 / 2110 / 3200S Product Manual:
ftp://ftp.octek.com.hk/UTILITY/UTILITY_PATCHES/DISK_MANAGER/QUANTUM/MANUALS/FIREBALL/FB_TM_S/CHAPTER...

There is no mention of Mode Page 29h.

The other pages are described as follows:

09H -- Peripheral Device Page
39H -- Quantum-Unique Drive Control Parameters

Unfortunately no data are provided.

Perhaps you could use the Wayback Machine to revisit archived Quantum web sites:
http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.quantum.com

[fzabkar]

Quantum Fireball TM SCSI Product Manual:
http://replay.web.archive.org/19980705030742/http://www.quantum.com/products/manuals/fireball_tm_s/

[Kretov]

Words cannot express how happy I am to have this problem solved!

The solution was found on page #76 of the document you provided (section 6.8.10). Setting the bit 2 of the byte 4 on page 0x39 to 1 had disabled the parity and allowed connecting this HDD to FutureDomain TMC-870 controller. I was even able to boot from it without having the drive low-level formatted first!

fzabkar, thank you so much for your help - I began to doubt that anyone in the world knows anything about this HDD before I received you message. It's a miracle, indeed!

Once again, many thanks!