SCSI Gurus i need your help

[cyberazi]

HI ALL,
I have a problem i need to ask.

i have a lot of scsi based machines in my office.
how do i do a RAW HDD to HDD copy of the HDD ( have a few sun workstations here also need to clone)

let say i have a SCSI controller in my pc system what other things i need???
i am using ths scsi card.
Adaptec - Adaptec SCSI Card 29320LPE

as in cable what type??
connector conver to ? 50 pim U2W scsi???
68pin???

pls help
i am a SCSI virgin

i need to know how to connect 2x old scsi hdds 50 pin to a 68-pin VHDCI external connector.. what cables and converters do i need?

 

[86technie]

First of all:

1) What are these machines for?
Data computing? Research? R&D?

2)
Firstly what mode is the SCSI controller set in?
If AHCI mode, there's no issue to clone the disk drive.
However the only Acronis Disk Director Advanced
can clone SCSI drives.
Norton Ghost I don't really recommend.
(No freeware or software from torrents or crack software.
Such software by right are not suppose to be use in a workplace.)
If the controller is in RAID mode, after you clone please
remember to set it back to the appropriate RAID mode.
When creating the Acronis Disk Advance bootable USB, do load in the SCSI driver.

Normally what most IT department practice for workstation
or server with SCSI.
They setup in RAID 1 or 5, this way they don't need to clone
the hardisk in case if the primary HDD fails.

Maybe you should consider setting up this way.
However you need additional SCSI drives which maybe costly
but tell your boss it is for data redundancy.
So as the Acronis Disk Director may cost a lot.

Unless the current setup is already in RAID mode 1 than it is much easier.
Just plug in a additional drive and it can mirror itself.
However changing RAID mode is not possible, different RAID mode the volume is created differently so please take extra caution about this.
If you accidentally change a RAID volume from 1 to O, you will erase the volume inside.

 

[commach]

i have a lot of scsi based machines in my office.
how do i do a RAW HDD to HDD copy of the HDD ( have a few sun workstations here also need to clone)

Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image.

let say i have a SCSI controller in my pc system what other things i need???
i am using ths scsi card.
Adaptec - Adaptec SCSI Card 29320LPE

as in cable what type??
connector conver to ? 50 pim U2W scsi???
68pin???

pls help
i am a SCSI virgin

i need to know how to connect 2x old scsi hdds 50 pin to a 68-pin VHDCI external connector.. what cables and converters do i need?

I think you should have a 2940UW SCSI controller card in one of the machine. Use this instead of buying the expensive 68-pin VHDCI cable which you also cannot use directly without an 50 pins SCSI enclosure to mount the 50 pins SCSI drives.

Depends on how and which SCSI controller you connect the 50 pins drives, you might need a cable with active terminator. The 2940UW is capable of auto terminate and set at default SCSI ID 7.

My last cloning of 50 pins SCSI drives was about 15 years ago, not many working 50 pins drives survived this long.

 

[localITguy]

Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image.



I think you should have a 2940UW SCSI controller card in one of the machine. Use this instead of buying the expensive 68-pin VHDCI cable which you also cannot use directly without an 50 pins SCSI enclosure to mount the 50 pins SCSI drives.

Depends on how and which SCSI controller you connect the 50 pins drives, you might need a cable with active terminator. The 2940UW is capable of auto terminate and set at default SCSI ID 7.

My last cloning of 50 pins SCSI drives was about 15 years ago, not many working 50 pins drives survived this long.

lao jiao spotted

listen to this guy

 

[xkiller213]

Haha I was thinking that you could just unmount the drive, then use dd to clone it...

dd bs=256K if=/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2 of=/dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s2

 

[ykgoh]

Not familiar with SCSI. What's so special about SCSI drives that those normal consumer level cloning software like Symantec Ghost and Acronis cannot clone ah?

The OS still reads them like a stream of bytes whether it is SCSI or SATA or IDE right? The physical differences would have been abstracted out at the firmware or BIOS level?

Just curious.

 

[86technie]

Not familiar with SCSI. What's so special about SCSI drives that those normal consumer level cloning software like Symantec Ghost and Acronis cannot clone ah?

The OS still reads them like a stream of bytes whether it is SCSI or SATA or IDE right? The physical differences would have been abstracted out at the firmware or BIOS level?

Just curious.

It's not cannot clone,
it is different controller and chipset at play especially the driver.


Consumer class cloning software like Acronis and Ghost
only cater to most consumer chipsets like Intel, AMD SATA controller only.
SCSI and SAS (SAS is the newer standard that replaced SCSI)
are supported on chipsets like LSI, Adaptec and etc.

The data throughput is a big difference between SATA, SCSI and SAS.
Hence only supported software from Acronis and Norton can support not only the controller but also the throughput.

I have never done SCSI or SAS using a cloning software rather than RAID 1/5. But one thing for sure, SCSI or SAS is very fast.
If you put SAS SSD, it can fly.

However SCSI and SAS, you have to maintain it well.
If there's firmware update or driver for the controller, update it
to improve the performance.

Disk have to be maintain since the speed is so fast, the
drive failure rate is quite high. So occasionally have to do
defraq or disk cleanup.

That is why most set in RAID 1/5 to prevent failure.

 

[ykgoh]

It's not cannot clone,
it is different controller and chipset at play especially the driver.


Consumer class cloning software like Acronis and Ghost
only cater to most consumer chipsets like Intel, AMD SATA controller only.
SCSI and SAS (SAS is the newer standard that replaced SCSI)
are supported on chipsets like LSI, Adaptec and etc.

The data throughput is a big difference between SATA, SCSI and SAS.
Hence only supported software from Acronis and Norton can support not only the controller but also the throughput.

I have never done SCSI or SAS using a cloning software rather than RAID 1/5. But one thing for sure, SCSI or SAS is very fast.
If you put SAS SSD, it can fly.

However SCSI and SAS, you have to maintain it well.
If there's firmware update or driver for the controller, update it
to improve the performance.

Disk have to be maintain since the speed is so fast, the
drive failure rate is quite high. So occasionally have to do
defraq or disk cleanup.

That is why most set in RAID 1/5 to prevent failure.

Good detailed explanation. Thanks.

 

[davidktw]

Not familiar with SCSI. What's so special about SCSI drives that those normal consumer level cloning software like Symantec Ghost and Acronis cannot clone ah?

The OS still reads them like a stream of bytes whether it is SCSI or SATA or IDE right? The physical differences would have been abstracted out at the firmware or BIOS level?

Just curious.

SCSI was parallel standard as oppose to SAS which is serial in the signally. SCSI is widely used for enterprise harddisk and peripherals. Some consumer peripherals also using SCSI in the past are flatbed scanners before USB was popular.

In the area of harddisk storage technologies, SCSI have better performance than PATA also known as PARALLEL IDE. One is they support daisy changing, the other is it has a more efficient implementation of I/O request TCQ. SCSI are also full duplex which IDE/SATA are half duplex for communication traffics