Peripheral Drives; Drive Cabling Considerations - Intel SC450NX - Server Platform - 0 MB RAM Product Manual

Peripheral Drives

Drive Cabling Considerations

This section summarizes device cabling requirements and constraints. The number of devices you
can install depends on:
The number supported by the bus
The number of physical drive bays available
The height of drives in the internal bays (1-inch or 1.6-inch high)
The combination of SCSI and IDE devices
IDE Requirements
An 18-inch long IDE cable that supports two drives is standard in the system. If you install an
IDE hard drive, we recommend placing it in the lowest internal drive bay to make cabling easier,
particularly if you also have an IDE device in the externally accessible bay.
For proper IDE operation, note the cable length specified in Figure 29. If no drives are present on
an IDE channel, the cable must be removed. If only one drive is installed, it must be connected at
the end of the cable.
Baseboard
NOTE
To disable the IDE controller: If you plan to disable the IDE controller to
reuse the interrupt for that controller, you must physically unplug the IDE
cable from the board connector if a cable is present. Simply disabling the
drive by configuring the SSU option does not make the interrupt available.
SCSI Requirements
One narrow and two wide SCSI cables are standard in the system.
All SCSI devices must be unterminated except the peripheral at the end of the SCSI cable.
Hard drives usually provide an active termination, while CD-ROM drives do not. Because we
recommend putting hard drives only in the internal bays, this means that you should route the
SCSI cable so that the last device on the cable is a hard drive in the internal bay.
12"
18"
Figure 29. IDE Cable Dimensions
6"
Drive 1 Drive 0
OM05093
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