Just one last question, I was able to exchange the 520 block size drives for 512 ones, so I highly recommend ocean-tech as an ebay surplus reseller. I do know that when using SATA drives with the MUX adapter I'm limited to 2TB of useable capacity per drive. My question is:
If I populate all16 bays with 3TB SAS drives (HUS723030ALS640) with no SATA drives, therefore no MUX adaptors, do I still have the same 2TB limitation on the Vtrak for Apple or would I have needed to purchase the E-Class version to use the full capacity of the 3TB drives?
I'm trying to decide whether to pick up 4 more drives to replace the 4 3tb sata drives already installed and use them in my Mac Pro, or, if I'm limited to 2TB even when running all SAS drives, to just keep them in the vtrak.
Thanks again for all of the help.
My tips for anyone else setting one of these up as DAS on a Mac:
if you need to reset the password, everything you need is in the guide linked in the 1st post. You will need a linux or windows TFTP server to run PKIFLASH to update the confuser image. (I tried several on the mac, over several days, but it would never connect. So I started rummaging through my closet to try and find my old general dynamics "toughbook" since it has a serial port. Then I realized that I'm an idiot and the only reason I needed a serial port was to "talk" to the vtrak and the PKIFLASH command just opened up an FTP client over the ethernet connction, so I could use pretty much any computer on my network. Once I made that realization updating the vtrak took less than 3 minutes including installing tftpd64)
Once you can log in using administrator and password, you can just follow the Apple quick start guide linked here: https://www.promise.com/Support/DownloadCenter
If you want to use the configuration scripts for the apple version at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT200273, you will need to use the wayback machine to get the archived version of the scripts or follow the manual configuration instructions at the bottom of the page, with one caveat: the instructions say that after you initialize the newly created logical drive it will be visible in disk utility. It was not for me. I had to follow the instruction at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201866 to configure LUN Mapping and Masking.
The settings I ended up using for my xserve's fiber channel control panel for all 4 ports, ( I'm using the LSI Logic LSI7404EP-LC) were:
Port Speed: 4Gb/s
Port Topology: Point to Point
Enable Hard Loop ID unchecked
on the Vtrak side, in WebPAM Pro under administrative tools>fiber channel management I have the following settings on both ports of both controllers:
Link Speed: 4Gb/s
Topology: N-Point
Hard ALPA left at default
Those are the settings that got me up and running, so hopefully that can help out someone else who might be struggling with thiers.
however: In my fibre channel control panel on the xserve, at first, only domain 3 showed as online with a green dot, the rest had a red dot, I restarted and a domain 1 was the only one online. All 4 were in the system report but only the online domain had the SCSI target device and SCSI Logical unit nested below it. I shutdown the vtrak and xserve, unplugged all of the cables and reinserted them, powered on the vtrak, waited until the controller lights went from red to green and powered up the xserve. Now I'm only showing 2 domains instead of all 4 but both are linked and online, so I didn't want to touch them again and risk something not working anymore.
