Nekochan Net

hi there

I decided to reuse a pair of old FC drives I had lying around. In my spare parts closet I also had a QLogic QLA2340 HBA, Stratos Lightwave MDB-9-6-1 Fiber to Copper MIA and some fiber optic patch cables. The only thing I was still missing was a FCAL backplane. So I went and I picked up the smallest and least expensive dual port FCAL backplane I could find on ebay. Which happened to be Sun 501-5699. I could not find any detailed specs for the backplane itself but 280R supports 2Gbps FC and 501-5699 is the only backplane it used. So I assumed it can do 2G. Which makes the MIA the weakest link - it only supports 1G. But it should do just fine for trying my concept out.

Using the standard SCA2 pinout I traced GND, +5V, +12V to the J0101 (white 6pin) connector and IN1+, IN1-, OUT1+, OUT1- from the both disks to the J0102 (grey 20pin) connector. In my first try I connected 5V and 12V power to the J0101, MIA's out to disk1's in, disk1's out to disk2's in, disk2's out to MIA's in and turned everything on... the disks got spinned up but did not get recognized by the host. I am going to double check all the connections/polarities/etc again tomorrow. But I would really appreciate if someone with better Sun hardware understanding than me would point out any (obvious?) mistakes or wrong assumptions on my part. Like maybe that J0103 (black 4pin) I2C connector is not used just for temperature monitoring but for sending some magic "make everything work" command? If someone's got full pinouts for the connectors - I could use that too.

Thanks



(let me know if the images do not show up - I just linked the best ones I could find)

My advice? Quit now....

_________________
Stuff.

that bad?

anyway... a little RTFM saved the day... again. The part I was missing was ODIS (output disable) pin of the MIA. The adapter does not work until that pin is pulled to the ground. Now it's working as I hoped it would. The next question is which 2Gbps fiber to copper MIA should I get?