Re: Disk drive types: 59C9, 59E1, 5B13 -- MIDRANGE-L

Thanks, Jim!

Additional note, I have a third partition on the primary box, and it, too, has a DMP001 resource, with yet a third disk drive serial number. So I have DMP001 on all three of my partitions, one in Not detected state and the other two in Operational, and each one reports a different serial number.

So at the end of the day, I think it's time to get an inventory of disk drives by serial number and see which one is assigned to which partition. That seems like a reasonable starting point. Is there a list somewhere for those suffixes? I see -050, -099 and -109. I can go into SST when I get a chance to figure out my RAID settings, but the suffixes seem to be a good shortcut.

On 12/18/2018 8:54 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

Joe:

Some definitions:

DMPxxx means the drive is set up for Multipath (MP portion of the drive name) So just to be really confusing in DST that drive will l show up at least twice. At least because if you were on a partition that was served by Dual VIOS and that installation has two Fibre SANs you could see as many as four. All it means is IBM i has multiple ways to get to the disk unit in case one off those methods stops.

If a drive says DPHxxx then the "H" means it's been marked read-only and will need to be formatted prior to use. See: https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas8N1013838 to fix that. Easy.

The extension to the drive indicates what kind of data protection is on the drive, for instance: -50 means no RAID. It basically tells you about if it is included in a parity set, if so is there striping on that drive or not. 90% of that you simply don't care about.

See: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/rzaly/rzalypdf.pdf
For much more detail.

Basically, unless you are really going to mess with disk space, you really don't need to know much.

Now in the example below, where one drive is not operational, the first question I ask is what hardware failed? My bet on the example below is that drive was removed from the system without using SST, and the system still thinks it should be there. IF you go STRSST, option 1, option 7, then option 4 (from memory so I do this a bit) you'll find non-reporting hardware. Unless you really think that hardware should be there, remove it.

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 8:27 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Disk drive types: 59C9, 59E1, 5B13

Like it or not, I'm becoming more familiar with our hardware and I'm finding some things that I consider anomalies. Case in point is my DSPHDWRSC display. It turns out we have a combination of SSD and spinny drives on the production partition. I'm just learning the ramifications of that (including the fact that CHGPF has a UNIT(*SSD) keyword!), but in so doing I decided to look at DSPHDWRSC on the development partition.

It seems like we have only spinny drives on the development partition, which is as it should be. However, it turns out on that partition we have cases where the same slot (I'm guessing) has two disk drives defined (I think), one of which is available in that partition and one of which is not (I assume). Yeah, I'm very, very confident of this information. It looks like this:

Resource Type-model Status Text
DMP001 59C9-050 Not detected Disk Unit
DMP073 59C9-099 Operational Disk Unit

They're both in location U5887.001.G78J00V-P1-D2. I have no idea what the -050 or -099 suffix means. But doing a little more research, it turns out the resources that are flagged as not detected show up in DSPHDWRSC on the production partition as Operational. That is, DMP001 is Not detected on the development partition but Operational on the production partition. The reverse is not true. Resources that are Operational on development (such as DMP073) do not show up at all on the production partition in DSPHDWRSC. So which is "normal"?

The resource number could be a red herring, though. Although DMP001 shows on both partitions, DMP001 on development has a different serial number than DMP001 on production. My head hurts.

There's one more thing that bothers me. Knowledge center tells me a
59C9 is a 300GB 15K 4K-block SAS drive, but that it's an AIX/Linux drive, not an IBM i drive. As far as I can tell, the IBM i equivalent is the 59E1, which is a 283GB drive. The main box is all 59C9 (and 5B13 SSD). We also have a remote CBU box with a mixture of 59E1 and 59C9. Is it normal to use the 300GB drive on an i partition? Enquiring minds want to know...

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