[SunRescue] Solaris 2.5.1/PPC

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Bill Bradford wrote:

> WHY did they do this, then leave the "normal" SS5-ish drive bays untouched?

No clue.  My first guess is that they eventually intended to redesign the
case but didn't for cost reasons.

The expense of the drive mounting setup is probably comparable to that of
the SCA card in the front of the SS5/SS20, so they didn't save anything.

> Is this the same design as the Netra NFS machine?  Open it up, and it looks
> like its full of black Styrofoam?
> 
> First time we got one of these in at ioNET in '96, we almost ripped all of
> that stuff out before we realized it was DESIGNED to be in there... 8-)

Right, the same box as the Netra NFS 150.  Ugly cyan color on the front of
a case, kind of looks like a mutant small U450 but with worse styling.
The LCD panel on the front is useless, and though the 6 drive bays in
front are hot swappable the system drive isn't (and requires tearing
almost the entire machine apart to get to).  Inside all of this is a bog
standard U1/170 motherboard and a SunSwift card, with an external cable to
connect to the drive bays.

Why they didn't go for a U1E and internally connected disks is beyond me,
but I did use it to good advantage at one point.  I had a U450 and a U150
installed 3000 miles away and we needed more space on the 450 (database
machine) and didn't need the drives on the 150.  No time to get an
internal disk expansion kit for the 450, so I had the onsite guys cross
connect the 150's disk cage to the 450's external SCSI chain. 

-James