Date: Sat, 2 Apr 88 08:51:32 EST From: Dwight D. McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@mckay.UUCP Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V1 #10 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Sat, 2 Apr 88 Volume 1 : Issue 10 Today's Topics: Disks for Sun 2??? Where to get Suns? +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ @ea.ecn.purdue.edu | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > -- or -- | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / ...ihnp4!pur-ee!mckay!... | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 29 Mar 88 17:28:40 CST From: pur-ee!cs.utexas.edu!vixen!ronbo (Ron Hitchens) Subject: Disks for Sun 2??? To: Suns-at-Home@ea.ecn.purdue.edu In V1 #9 dwight (Dwight D. McKay), our illustrious moderator, asks about disks for his Sun 2/120: > What I'm after is one or two cheap, large disks that will fit in the Sun 2 > side-car. I know there's got to be other/better/cheaper solutions then the > disks Sun suggests. That's certainly true. > - What other choices are there? Sun 2/120s use an Adaptec ACB4000 SCSI to ST506 target adapter, and generic ST506 drives, which is what IBM PCs use. So, in general, you can use most any drive a PC can. It doesn't matter if diag knows about the drive or not. For SCSI, the controller is more important to diag than the drive itself. All diag will need to know is the geometry of the disk, such as #cylinders, #heads, etc. 5.25" ST506 disks are relatively cheap and plentiful because zillions are sold for PCs. There is a sort of cutoff point at about 80mb, which is about the max usable size for a PC. After that prices shoot up and availability drops off quickly. You may be able to get more bytes for the buck buying 2 70mb, than 1 140mb drive, depending on who you buy from. Computer Shopper magazine is an excellent place to look for ST506 drives. Do keep in mind that many drives designed for PCs, though they may have the capacity and a good reliability record, are godawful SLOW. So keep an eye on the access timings. Also, don't be fooled by RLL numbers. If a drive is advertised as 90mb RLL, its really a 60mb drive which requires an RLL controller to squeeze half again as many sectors onto each track via some electronics trickery. RLL is basically a hardware hack, avoid it. Your ACB400 doesn't know diddly about RLL, so you'll only get the base capacity of the drive. Selecting the proper drive is a bit of a balancing act. > - Where is the cheapest/best place to buy one of these disks? (I've been looking in Computer Shopper...) There are, of course, hundreds of places to buy ST506 drives, all of them cheaper than Sun. "Best" is a subjective call, so I'll simply re-recommend my favorite: Computer Surplus Store, which I've mentioned before. They don't carry a whole lot of drives, but many pass through their hands. It's worth giving them a call to see what they have on hand. Last time I talked to them they had some Maxtor 1140s for $1500. There are tons of other suppliers which advertise in Computer Shopper, pick one that has what you want and will give you a warranty. Almost forgot, watch out for "drive kits", you don't need to buy a PC disk controller with your drive, even though some sales pinheads won't be able to comprehend how you'll be able to do without it :-). > - How about adding a SCSI disk? (one with a built-in SCSI controller) > Can it be done on a Sun2? It probably can be done, but I wouldn't recommend it. The problem with imbedded SCSI drives is that they may speak a different dialect of SCSI than the Sun knows about. Most any SCSI device will probably work for normal reads, writes and seeks, but the difficulty arises in the more specialized commands such as mode select, formatting, sector mapping, get sense, etc. The software provided by Sun only knows how to speak to the Adaptec ACB400 (SCSI->ST506) and Emulex MD21 (SCSI->ESDI). If you have some method of formatting the drive seperately (a Mac+ makes a good SCSI exerciser) you can make it work, but you may be up a creek if you buy a preformatted drive and it develops a bad sector later, you won't be able reformat to map it out. And it may not handle SCSI disconnect/reconnect, which the Sun SCSI device driver began using in 3.3. The ACB400 doesn't support it anyway, but the driver uses some rather arcane methods to figure out which SCSI controller it's talking to. If your imbedded SCSI drive doesn't support disconnect/ reconnect, and it doesn't respond *exactly* like an ACB4000, the driver may assume it's speaking to an Emulex controller and attempt to do disconnect. Chances are you will not be pleased with the result. Also, imbedded SCSI drives cost a lot more for the same capacity, since you're also buying the SCSI interface logic. Why buy another SCSI adapter when you've already got one in your system? It's doubtful you'll get much of a performance gain, certainly not enough to justify the extra cost. I hope all this verbiage informs more than it confuses. Ron Hitchens ronbo@vixen.uucp hitchens@sally.utexas.edu [Thanks Ron. --ddm] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 26 Mar 88 11:14:06 EST From: pur-ee!davy (Dave Curry) Subject: Where to get Suns? To: suns-at-home@mckay.uucp Okay, here's a question for those of you who have Suns at home from someone who's still looking for one. I'm too poor to call up Sun and order a new Sun 3, so I've been looking for used Sun 2's. I know of one company that sells a 2/120, 3MB, 2 50MB disks, screen, mouse, etc. for $4000. This is still on my high end. Someplace out east had one in Sun-Spots for $2500 (I was second on the list - damn), so I know they're out there in the price range I want. So, those of you with used Sun 2 boxes (or Sun 3's if they were cheap), where did you get yours? How much did it cost? What hardware did it come with? Please only respond if you got yours from someplace that would likely still have them to sell. Responses like "I got mine from Joe Wizard but he only had this one" are useless (to me anyway). If I get enough useful information, I'll summarize to the list. --Dave Curry davy@intrepid.ecn.purdue.edu {ihnp4,iuvax,rutgers}!pur-ee!davy ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************