RE: SCA SCSI drives for Ultra 1

["Gabriel J. Michael" <gabriel.michael%yale.edu@localhost>]

Well, that's encouraging news. I will give it a try, then.

Thanks everyone for the quick responses!

Gabriel

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce O'Neel [mailto:netbsd%pckswarms.ch@localhost] 
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 10:54 AM
To: Gabriel J. Michael
Cc: port-sparc64%NetBSD.org@localhost
Subject: Re: SCA SCSI drives for Ultra 1

Hi,

While I don't have an ultra 1, I do have both an Ultra 2 and
a whole mess of SparcStations (4, 5s, and 20s).

All of them take SCA drives, and, I've put everything from the
orig 1G all the way up to 140GB or so drives in all of them.

I'll admit that in the SparcStation 4 140GB is effectively infinite
since it's slow enough that I'll likely never wait long enough
to fill the disk.

Currently the Ultra 2 has 74 and a 140GB sca drives, and I'm running
a SparcStation 20 with a 36GB drive in it.

My *guess* is that any 80 pin SCA drive will fit and run, and will
probably run ok.

If it's not too expensive then it's worth a shot.

cheers

bruce

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 09:59:32AM -0500, Gabriel J. Michael wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm relatively new to NetBSD, and new to the mailing list.
> 
> I am considering getting some hard drives for my old Ultra 1  
> Enterprise. It originally had two 4 GB disks, but one has died, and  
> Ebay has some good deals on 18, 36, and 74 GB drives.
> 
> My question is this - the Ultra 1 has an SCA SCSI backplane that can  
> support two disks. I know that there are two versions of SCA, SCA-1  
> and SCA-2, but it's difficult to find information about them, so I am  
> unsure what version the Ultra 1 has (the service manual doesn't say,  
> either), whether they are backward compatible, etc. I don't want to  
> buy a 74 GB disk only to find that it doesn't work in my system.
> 
> I also know (from the Wikipedia article) that there are "single- 
> ended" and "low voltage differential" types of SCA - http:// 
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Connector_Attachment - but not sure what  
> difference, if any, that makes for me.
> 
> Anyone have any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Gabriel
> 
> PS - let me say how impressed I am with the hardware support of the  
> sparc64 port! I originally put Debian on this machine, only to find  
> that there is no Linux driver for the Sbus to PCMCIA bridge. So, I  
> decided to install NetBSD. To be honest, it was painful at first (I  
> think coming from stuff like Ubuntu has made me lazy!) - there is no  
> dvorak map in the generic sparc64 kernel, so I had to create my own.  
> But following the very good documentation, I quickly had things up  
> and running. I recompiled the kernel last night to include the nell  
> pcmcia bridge driver, and a few other things, and this morning I am  
> up and running with a pcmcia WiFi card!