I’ve connected a 32 GB USB Flash Drive to the front USB connector of this Power 7 IBM i V7.3 server. With the System value for Auto-start config previously set to 1, the server sets this device in the QOPT (optical) subsystem with name RMS01. The USB was previously initialized with UDF file system, which is a requirement for the Power 7 system. A command such as “CPY OBJ(‘/home/pstjean/readme’) TODIR(‘/QOPT/USB_P1-T3-L1/tmp’)” results in the 1 object being copy from the IFS to the USB drive.
The USB can subsequently be read on a Windows 10 or Linux Ubuntu 18.04 system for example.
This IBM Link was used as a basis to validate this capability, and therefore some naming, ie. volume label, may be similar. For example, the initialize USB to UDF command was copied from the linked URL and pasted onto a QCMD command line screen and executed.
The command DSPMSG QSYSOPR was run to validate that the device was connected, which shows the USB device with volume USB_P1-T3-L1 was added.
With this capability set up and validated, this provides for another alternate means by which to move/copy objects from one system or another, and even provide a means of a short term backup of sorts. IBM does not recommend that the USB drive be used for system and permanent type backups due to the “inconsistent” performance of USB flash drives across manufacturers.