[rescue] Sun Sparcstation 20 hard disks

[J. Alexander Jacocks]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 4:13 PM, Oliver Cromwell
<vintagehacker at gmail.com> wrote:
> My big concern is the current state of the hard drives, and they range in
> size and age it appears.  I would like to fully replace all disks on these
> systems with new disks but need some guidance.  It looks like they are
SCA-2
> disks with a single-connector interface and a SS can use disks up to 2GB in
> size.  Is there a source for these disks new?

Any SCA disk should be usable, no matter the size.  I'm not sure,
offhand, what the maximum disk size that SunOS 4.1.x can address, but
Solaris 2.5.1 can address 1tb disks, so I wouldn't worry too much
about disks not being recognized.  At worst case, you may have to
define fake disk geometry for SunOS 4.1.x, but that's not too hard.

As far as new and quiet goes, modern 10k disks are likely to be the
quietest.  You can, of course, get SCA-connected SSDs, but they aren't
even close to reasonable, in price, for systems of this age.
Theoretically 7200rpm (slowest-spinning SCA-2 disks that I am aware
of) disks could be quieter, but all the 7200rpm SCSI disks that I have
use older-style (read NOISY) bearings.  All modern disks use fluid
bearings.

Good luck!
- Alex