On 2009-05-22, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2009-05-20, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

[ ... ]

O.K. That does not sound like anything which would fit the
Tadpole, which is the only one which is a problem for me.


I think the Ultra 10 I have has an IDE controller card, and I don't
plan to fix the dead motherboard.

The Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 were unusual ones in that they were
aimed at the low budget end of the SPARC machine spectrum. Thus the IDE
drives.

The Tadpole was made during the SCSI-only period -- and
unfortunately the drives which I have are rather small -- with the
largest being either 2 GB or 4 GB -- a bit of a squeeze for Solaris 2.6,
even before I start putting in my suite of programs. :-)

The connector for external drives is one which was apparently
used on some earlier Mac laptops -- an angular square 'D' with a grid of
pins. Luckily, I was able to find cables from this to standard SCSI
connectors -- but a laptop which *needs* an external disk box is a bit
awkward. :-)

Some later SPARC systems may use SAS (SATA) drives, but the
period which I am using (except for a couple of U-10s and one U-5) are
either SCSI or FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop). The FC-AL drives
will let you hook up to 125 drives on a single interface -- though they
must slow down if you are trying to use many of them fast at once. But
14 drives spread between two RAID-5 arrays, two hot spares and two just
sitting there waiting for a specific need.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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