Compaq SmartArray 7 bay series 3161

Does anyone have any information on this unit? It is a 7 bay hotswap chassis that uses the old beige compaq trays. I wanted to know if it would work on a standard scsi card or if there are are special controllers for it, and if it is special (compaq controller) will it work in a regualr machine or will it require a proliant server. Will it croak if I install large drives in the sca tray? One person I know said the unit would be very slow if i didnt use compaq drives. I would like to upgrade it (18.2 X 10 pack is 200$) but I wont if i can't use it.

Any help would be great!

Thanks
~Chris

Would this link help you????

http://wwss1pro.compaq.com/support/h...88&prodid=5340|Smart+Array+Cluster+Storage

In the compaq support area I have not found any evidence that compaq even made this thing. I looked through there and they seem to only support the newer array stuff. I'm not willing to spend a few thousand on a personal experiment :D.

Thanks for the try, I'm hopeing that someone here is already using one of these somewhere???

~Chris

You might check out Compaq's tech library. Unfortunately, I couldn't find your model number...you might double-check and try again.

Sorry I couldn't help out more...let us know what you find out.
Good Luck!

Thanks for the try guys. Compaq seems to have nothing on their website. I did hook it up to my friends server and it and all the drives showed up on the chain. It seems it is purely a hot swap bay and nothing else. The card does all the "RAID" features it is supposed to do.

~Chris

Did you send an e-mail to Compaq support? I have had really good luck with this. I have some old Proliant server equipment. In a few cases, I wanted a .pdf file for the owner's manual, but was unable to find it. In each case, I contacted support and they either sent me a link to the file, or if it was no longer on their site anywhere, they sent it as an attachment.