[Suns-at-Home] Ultra 10 IDE

[Magnus]

Oscar Endre Edvardsen wrote:

> Not as far as I know. But you might get slighly better performance 
> ditching the original 5400 RPM disk and installing a faster IDE disc. 
> It'll still be pretty slow, though.

The best performance I've been able to get out of the Ultra 5 / Ultra 10 
IDE controller is a pitiful 5 to 6 MB/sec on direct disk reads.  It's 
quite shameful.

> If you use BSD or Linux you could use just about any pci scsi card, and 
> boot from IDE. But since you ask about sparc support I assume you need 
> it to be recognized by the OBP. I know some third party scsi cards 
> eighter come with, or can be flashed with OpenBoot instructions, like 
> some symbios cards. Unfortunatly I don't which cards will work.

Symbios SYM22801 will get you Wide UltraSCSI, which is spec'd at 
40MB/sec and real world I get pretty darned close to that with fast 
Ultra320 drives.  Huge improvement over the on-board IDE, and you can 
boot off it directly.

> I'm posting this message from an Ultra 5 with a scsi card, but I'm not 
> sure which one. If you can't make any of your existing scsi cards work 
> in your U10, you could always find a Sun branded scsi card on ebay. 
> They're quite cheap these days.


The caveat is that Wide UltraSCSI cards are cheap.  If you want to move 
to a more modern standard like Ultra320, prepare to shell out a lot of 
dough.  That's the situation that I'm in now; rich on Ultra320 drives, 
but poor on controllers.