[ On Wednesday, April 4, 2001 at 11:22:53 (-0500), Kevin P. Neal wrote: ]
> Subject: Re:  SCSI mostly...
>
> > Memory
>  
> > Sun-4/260/280 
> > 
> > 501-1254 [32MB ECC] 
> > 501-1576 [16MB ECC] 
> 
> These are the two boards that are "not supported" in the 3/260. I have
> a 16 meg board that works with one of my 3/200 boards and not the other.

"not supported" is Sun (well pretty well any mfgr) jargon for saying "We
never sold a machine with that configuration and so we won't tell you
whether it was designed to work that way nor will we tell you if it was
tested in that configuration either."

I don't remember exactly which RAM boards I have, but they are Sun
originals, and they do fully support ECC, and they have 32MB worth of
those little vertical-mount RAM chips crammed onto them.

They definitely "work" in any 3/260 or 3/280 I've tried them in (most of
my machines have relatively new backplanes), and they are fully
recognized and tested by the PROM (at least those I have tried), and
fully recognized and utilized by SunOS-4.1.1u1 (and NetBSD).

Way, way, way back in the archives of this list there should be postings
from me that give more details of the troubles I had and which may give
the actual part numbers of my boards.....  If anyone really really wants
to know the part numbers they can come visit and help me move some
equipment around in my cabinets to make room for it and then help me
cart it in from the garage and get it running again!  ;-)

Whether the crashes I was experiencing are due to some sort of bus
loading problem that eventually causes memory corruption, or interferes
with the correct electrical functioning of the VCACHE, etc.; or whether
they were just due to the unfiltered power I was running them on, I do
not know.  IIRC removing one board didn't help any and so bus loading
problems are unlikely to be an issue.

In any case having 128MB of RAM in a 25MHz Sun-3 sure helps speed things
up on a general-purpose Unix box, even if you do have fairly modern and
fast SCSI drives attached to it.  Even reading e-mail in Emacs+VM wasn't
that horrendously slow as to be unusable (though that was 19.34+VM-v5.x)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>