Hi, I have recently inherited an old p520 from work running AIX 6.1, based on the POWER6 CPU. I'm planning to play around with it and use it to learn the system, so this is a purely personal project. The machine is not under a support contract any more.
I am looking to replace one of the disks which might be failing. It's not the OS disk, and has nothing important on it. It works fine right now but a few errors were logged before I got it. I looked on eBay and elsewhere for a cheap replacement disk and there are many such items available. I was told that it needs to have the correct IBM firmware and formatted with 512 byte sectors. I found a couple of disks which are 146.8 GB, 15k RPM SAS with an IBM caddy (used but working, pulled from a server) and has 512 byte sectors, but listed for "Power Systems AIX/Linux". I believe "Power Systems" refers to newer CPUs like POWER7+, while my machine is a pSeries model.
My question is: can I use this disk on my POWER6 system? Is the newer firmware backward compatible? I'm an AIX newbie BTW so please be patient :)
Also generally any tips for spare parts/future replacements if anyone else also has such old machines to play with?
I am looking to replace one of the disks which might be failing. It's not the OS disk, and has nothing important on it. It works fine right now but a few errors were logged before I got it. I looked on eBay and elsewhere for a cheap replacement disk and there are many such items available. I was told that it needs to have the correct IBM firmware and formatted with 512 byte sectors. I found a couple of disks which are 146.8 GB, 15k RPM SAS with an IBM caddy (used but working, pulled from a server) and has 512 byte sectors, but listed for "Power Systems AIX/Linux". I believe "Power Systems" refers to newer CPUs like POWER7+, while my machine is a pSeries model.
My question is: can I use this disk on my POWER6 system? Is the newer firmware backward compatible? I'm an AIX newbie BTW so please be patient :)
Also generally any tips for spare parts/future replacements if anyone else also has such old machines to play with?