[SunRescue] Decstation 3100 and 5000/25 drives on Suns?????

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, BSD Bob wrote:

> I picked up several Decstation 3100 and 5000/25 machines in surplus today,
> with the intent of using them for scsi drive fodder.  They seem to have
> Quantum and Conner made drives with DEC badges on them.
> 
> They appear to be RZ24E,   RZ24L-E,  and RZ23L-E labelled.
> 
> Anyone have the specs on those for Sun 3, Sun 4, Sun SS1, Sun IPX use?
> I have had bad luck trying to format these things using the standard
> format.dat file info, for some unknown reason, on the old hardware.
> 
> The 23's are 1 gig, and the 24's are 2 gig, I think.

Nope.  The RZ24L-E is a 245MB drive, the RZ23L-E is a 121MB drive and the
RZ24E is a 209MB drive.  Remember that these systems were contemporary
with the Sparc 1 and 2, which shipped with similar sized drives.  By
looking up the Quantum/Conner datasheets you should be able to find out
which models correspond to the DEC-badged drives (there once was a table
floating around one of the VAX groups but I've not seen it in years).

> I am expecting I can use up to 1 gig drives in the sun3/sun4 things,
> and the 2 gig drives in the sun4c things.  Is that correct?

These drives should work well in Sun systems as they follow the SCSI spec
fairly well (better than many other DEC SCSI products).  I used an RZ23
(104MB) in my SS1 at one point.

You can use larger drives in sun4 systems as long as you're not running
ancient versions of SunOS.  I had a pair of DEC 2GB drives in my 4/330 and
they ran like a charm.  Larger drives will work as well, you just can't
let the root partition extend past 2GB or the PROM won't be able to find
the boot blocks.

-James