A system for communication between components in a computer storage system
includes a drive enclosure device having a plurality of disk drives. A
switch module is electrically coupled to the drive enclosure device. The
module has a plurality of physical layer links (PHYs). The module
generates out-of-band (OOB) signals to transmit to the drive enclosure
device, detects a physical location of an active drive enclosure device
by interrogating the PHYs, and sends a serial management protocol (SMP)
instruction to the drive enclosure device to perform a task, the SMP
instruction based on the physical location.