Communicator e3000 MPE/iX Release 6.0 Express 1 (C.60.01) (30216-90286)

62 Chapter3

Technical Articles

DVD Supported on the HP 3000

by Alex Early and Dave Black

Commercial Systems Division

The embedded CD-ROM shipped with many HP 3000 servers has come to the end of its

life. However, many customers purchased HP 3000s with CD-ROMs to take advantage of

system update material and manuals that are available on CDs. The A3715A, a 12x

CR-ROM, is being replaced by the new DVD-ROM. The DVD-ROM supports usage of the

older CD-ROM disks.

Customers wishing to take advantage of DVD-ROM for updates, can simply add a

DVD-ROM to their HP 3000 system. For customers in support contracts, who have older

CD-ROMs, your CD-ROM will be replaced with a DVD-ROM, if there are no CD-ROMs

available. The DVD-ROM drive unit has a 32X CD-ROM transfer rate. The DVD-ROM is

supported in the following packages:

Product Numbers

0950-3398 DVD-303 SCSI Slot-Load DVD-ROM Drive Unit

A5220A Embedded Product Number.

C4318SZ opt 108 Highlander Factory Rack

C4314A Highlander Deskside Standalone

C4315A Highlander Field Rack

Current Limitations on Use

There is a limitation on the use of the DVD-ROM due to a defect that is currently being

investigated by the lab. The defect is documented in SR 4701-423095. The one-line

description for that defect is:

NOTE

Data corruption on DVD drives when I/O rate is >300 per sec.

During certiﬁcation testing for the DVD drives it was discovered that, when running the

DVDs on faster or busy systems (when the IO rates are above 300 IOs per second), data

corruption can occur to ﬁles being brought in from the DVD to disk. This tends to happen

with large ﬁles.

The corruption area of the ﬁle is misplaced data from the same ﬁle. The corruption has

been seen as a loose repeating pattern as small as 208 bytes and as large as 8624 bytes in

length. The problem has been seen on a 959/400KS.

The main effect of this is that customers using HPINSTAL must have their systems in an

“idle state” when using the DVDs. If you are using HPINSTAL, then nothing else can be

going on with the system. This is to ensure that the IOs do not exceed 300 per second.

CSY recognizes this will be an issue for customers and is working to resolve this problem.

The DVDs need to be made available in order to resume shipments of new systems.