[rescue] which drives for a blade 100?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Arthur Wouk wrote:

> it has a 20gig ide drive in it. i am told that the ide controller is a
> dog, and i should get a scsi card. anyone have a sunpci scsi card for
> it?  it would help if i had the part number for it in my search for
> one? or can i use any pci scsi card in it?

Look for a card based around the Symbios 5C895 or 5C875 chip.  Most of
the ones I've found will Just Work in OpenBoot and Solaris (or whatever
OS you plan to run).  The beautiful thing about these cards is that
OpenBoot knows how to talk to the controller chip directly (ie: it
doesn't need to see fcode on the card, as it does with most adapters).

A cursory check of eBay says you should be able to get something nice
for less than $25.  I'm pretty sure I picked up my last stack of Symbios
cards for $10 - $15 each at Goodwill in Austin.  These (really
excellent, actually) cards don't tend to bring all that much because the
name isn't as well-known in the PC world as Adaptec is.

> is there any gain to be had from replacing the 20gig ide drive witha
> larger one?

Well, yeah.  You'll have access to more slow storage.  Just abandon the
idea of any[0] Sun system having decent IDE performance and you'll be
okay.


[0] Okay, the V100 and Netra X1 platform have okay performance, but the
     Netra X1 is irritating me right now because it tops out at 132GB per
     disk, and I'd -really- like to toss some big disks into it.  Anyone
     know if the V100 has the same silly limitation?
-- 
Jonathan Patschke    )   "A man who never dreams goes slowly mad."
Elgin, TX           (      --Thomas Dolby, "Valley of the Mind's Eye"