[rescue] SATA on SPARC systems

[Eddie Cottongim]

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2017 22:07:37 -0500
Subject: [rescue] SATA on SPARC systems ::WAS:::::Re: Saved this Ultra
10 from Central Mich U Surplus Sale
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
I have them on my personal archive.
Not that I have spent a significant sum, but I have purchased several SATA
controllers, and have not had luck yet on SPARC base systems.
I'm up for another round of this if everyone else is.
If someone has a HDD controller in their SPARC system, with SATA drives
*successfully* hanging off of it, please share.
Jerry

Forgive this rather long post, but SATA-with-SPARC and the Ultra-10 in
general are worthy of it!
Since 2013, I have been using a SUperSSpeed S301 SLC SATA drive as the
primary drive in my 1993 SPARCstation-10 (!), via
an ACARD ARS-2160S SATA-to-68pin-Ultra160-SCSI adaptor drive-size box, in
turn via an Antares Microsystems 20-050-0061
single-ended Wide-Ultra-SCSI SBus card, all mounted internally without any
case mods needed.
This is *waaay* faster than even 68-pin Wide-Fast-SCSI rotating rust HDDs
attached to a SunSwift SBus card. This is in spite of
the fact that the SS10 (180MHz CPUs on 40 MHz mainbus with 20 MHz SBus)
cannot drive the SSD disk at anywhere near it's maximum
I/O rate... it is still vastly better than an HDD.
Although there several makes of SATA-SCSI adaptor, due caution is needed.
Addonics made a truly awful one, couldn't get much better than 600Kb/s
and 75 IOPS through it, even with an SSD, which rendered it a rather
pointless item - my 1996 direct-attach SCSI HDDs (Quantum LPS525S) can do
that!
There are also several models from ACARD, all are either pretty good or
*very* good. The ARS-2160 and ARS-3120 adaptors are handy because they are
compatible with both LVD SCSI and Single-Ended SCSI, which gives extra
flexibility when choosing the SCSI HBA card you'll need.
Only thing to watch out for is to get the right connector-variant: the
ARS-2130S and ARS-2160H use 80-pin SCA SCSI connectors, whereas the
ARS-3120 (no "S")
and ARS-2160 (no "H") have 68-pin SCSI connectors - which is most likely
what you would want for internal drives/cables in an Ultra-10 etc.
Downside is that these adaptors are not cheap (although compared to HDD
prices way back in 1993, they are!).
https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2160-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-160mb-68pin~26221
https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2320-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-320mb-68pin~26223
You might be able to grovel some up on ebay or Amazon a little bit cheaper.
At the risk of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, you would want a
"Sun-bootable" SCSI card to go with it - one with OpenBOOT Forth ROM chip,
rather than a PC-BIOS ROM chip. Several "PC" SCSI PCI cards will work, but
only for secondary storage, not to boot the system. If you are going to
HVD SCSI is not supported by the adaptors and will damage them.
One thing to watch for when doing this in a Sun SPARC system, the Solaris
"poweroff" command doesn't explicitly flush SCSI device buffers, so will
sometimes
cause filesystem corruption. For my SS10, I wrote a small C program that
issues "SCSI flush device buffer" commands, and edited the /etc/rc5 script
to invoke it
as the last thing it does before "init" cuts the power - and then remember
to use "init 5" to power-off the system rather than "poweroff". Using "init
0" then manually
flipping the power-switch is also OK, "init 0" *does* issue an explicit
"SCSI flush device buffer" command to SCSI disks.
The alternative to this all this malarkey would be to use an SSD with a
supercap.
For the Ultra-10, there is also a rather complex graphics situation (two
differently-behaving versions of the on-board ATI Rage chipset, depending
on motherboard revision -
the original ones cannot do simultaneous 8-bit and 24-bit colour so can
result in colour-flashing; and some users maintain that the on-board
graphics performance is usable
but just barely). Long and short of it is that getting either a (vertical)
Sun Creator UPA graphics card or a Raptor-GFX8P PCI graphics card (Solaris
2.6 and later have built-in
drivers for those) is a much better bet. In principle you could even put a
single-board UPA Elite-3D card in there, but that might be going a bit too
far!
Finally, if anyone wants to take my spare 440MHz Ultra-5/10 CPU (with 2Mb
L2 cache) off my hands, drop me a line. It reliably long-term overclocks to
472MHz with just a couple of OBP commands.
Regards,
Mike Spooner
http://mbus.sunhelp.org
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

Thanks, there's some really good info in there.

As best I can tell, using these adapters mostly hinges on having or
finding a LVD/single ended ultra SCSI sbus card, which seems pretty hard
to find. The HVD X1065A is cheap and common but not much help.

I haven't seen a way to use a SATA drive adapter yet for fast-wide scsi,
which I think would be the situation on a SPARCStation-20 or using the
fairly easy to find SunSwift card (the SS-20 having the further problem
of the 80 pin SCA connector). On my SS-20, I used the 50 pin connector
intended for the CDROM to run a SCSI2SD card, which seems to work.

By the way, on the fast SCSI front, about a year ago a new rev (v6) of
the SCSI2SD card came out which supports higher speeds and claims to
come closer to the potential 10 mb/sec fast SCSI, whereas v5 came in at
about 1.5 mb/sec. Either is probably fine for the slower SPARCs,
especially given the cost and convenience of swapping SD cards easily,
but I'd think a SATA drive would have better endurance, at least. I
haven't tried this newer version yet but if I do I'll post a comparison.

Eddie
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

[Stefan Skoglund]

Post by Eddie Cottongim

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2017 22:07:37 -0500
Subject: [rescue] SATA on SPARC systems ::WAS:::::Re: Saved this Ultra
10 from Central Mich U Surplus Sale
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
I have them on my personal archive.
Not that I have spent a significant sum, but I have purchased several SATA
controllers, and have not had luck yet on SPARC base systems.
I'm up for another round of this if everyone else is.
If someone has a HDD controller in their SPARC system, with SATA drives
*successfully* hanging off of it, please share.
Jerry

Forgive this rather long post, but SATA-with-SPARC and the Ultra-10 in
general are worthy of it!
Since 2013, I have been using a SUperSSpeed S301 SLC SATA drive as the
primary drive in my 1993 SPARCstation-10 (!), via
an ACARD ARS-2160S SATA-to-68pin-Ultra160-SCSI adaptor drive-size box, in
turn via an Antares Microsystems 20-050-0061
single-ended Wide-Ultra-SCSI SBus card, all mounted internally without any
case mods needed.
This is *waaay* faster than even 68-pin Wide-Fast-SCSI rotating rust HDDs
attached to a SunSwift SBus card. This is in spite of
the fact that the SS10 (180MHz CPUs on 40 MHz mainbus with 20 MHz SBus)
cannot drive the SSD disk at anywhere near it's maximum
I/O rate... it is still vastly better than an HDD.
Although there several makes of SATA-SCSI adaptor, due caution is needed.
Addonics made a truly awful one, couldn't get much better than 600Kb/s
and 75 IOPS through it, even with an SSD, which rendered it a rather
pointless item - my 1996 direct-attach SCSI HDDs (Quantum LPS525S) can do
that!
There are also several models from ACARD, all are either pretty good or
*very* good. The ARS-2160 and ARS-3120 adaptors are handy because they are
compatible with both LVD SCSI and Single-Ended SCSI, which gives extra
flexibility when choosing the SCSI HBA card you'll need.
Only thing to watch out for is to get the right connector-variant: the
ARS-2130S and ARS-2160H use 80-pin SCA SCSI connectors, whereas the
ARS-3120 (no "S")
and ARS-2160 (no "H") have 68-pin SCSI connectors - which is most likely
what you would want for internal drives/cables in an Ultra-10 etc.
Downside is that these adaptors are not cheap (although compared to HDD
prices way back in 1993, they are!).
https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2160-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-160mb-68pin~26221
https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2320-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-320mb-68pin~26223
You might be able to grovel some up on ebay or Amazon a little bit cheaper.
At the risk of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, you would want a
"Sun-bootable" SCSI card to go with it - one with OpenBOOT Forth ROM chip,
rather than a PC-BIOS ROM chip. Several "PC" SCSI PCI cards will work, but
only for secondary storage, not to boot the system. If you are going to
HVD SCSI is not supported by the adaptors and will damage them.
One thing to watch for when doing this in a Sun SPARC system, the Solaris
"poweroff" command doesn't explicitly flush SCSI device buffers, so will
sometimes
cause filesystem corruption. For my SS10, I wrote a small C program that
issues "SCSI flush device buffer" commands, and edited the /etc/rc5 script
to invoke it
as the last thing it does before "init" cuts the power - and then remember
to use "init 5" to power-off the system rather than "poweroff". Using "init
0" then manually
flipping the power-switch is also OK, "init 0" *does* issue an explicit
"SCSI flush device buffer" command to SCSI disks.
The alternative to this all this malarkey would be to use an SSD with a
supercap.
For the Ultra-10, there is also a rather complex graphics situation (two
differently-behaving versions of the on-board ATI Rage chipset, depending
on motherboard revision -
the original ones cannot do simultaneous 8-bit and 24-bit colour so can
result in colour-flashing; and some users maintain that the on-board
graphics performance is usable
but just barely). Long and short of it is that getting either a (vertical)
Sun Creator UPA graphics card or a Raptor-GFX8P PCI graphics card (Solaris
2.6 and later have built-in
drivers for those) is a much better bet. In principle you could even put a
single-board UPA Elite-3D card in there, but that might be going a bit too
far!
Finally, if anyone wants to take my spare 440MHz Ultra-5/10 CPU (with 2Mb
L2 cache) off my hands, drop me a line. It reliably long-term overclocks to
472MHz with just a couple of OBP commands.
Regards,
Mike Spooner
http://mbus.sunhelp.org
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

Thanks, there's some really good info in there.
As best I can tell, using these adapters mostly hinges on having or
finding a LVD/single ended ultra SCSI sbus card, which seems pretty hard
to find. The HVD X1065A is cheap and common but not much help.
I haven't seen a way to use a SATA drive adapter yet for fast-wide scsi,
which I think would be the situation on a SPARCStation-20 or using the
fairly easy to find SunSwift card (the SS-20 having the further problem
of the 80 pin SCA connector). On my SS-20, I used the 50 pin connector
intended for the CDROM to run a SCSI2SD card, which seems to work.
By the way, on the fast SCSI front, about a year ago a new rev (v6) of
the SCSI2SD card came out which supports higher speeds and claims to
come closer to the potential 10 mb/sec fast SCSI, whereas v5 came in at
about 1.5 mb/sec. Either is probably fine for the slower SPARCs,
especially given the cost and convenience of swapping SD cards easily,
but I'd think a SATA drive would have better endurance, at least. I
haven't tried this newer version yet but if I do I'll post a comparison.
Eddie

The Narrow scsi connector is the narrow face of the same bus ie with
that one you basically have a wide-to-narrow adapter on the system card.
The computer's connection to the scsi-bus is between the wide one and
the wide-to-narrow adapter.
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

[CLIFFORD HAIGHT]

There are a lot of alternative options for disks. I have a SCSI2SD 5, ACARD LVD TO IDE, SCSI SSD and a SCSI to PCCard. For my Sun Ultra 5 I have a SCSI card which is a massive improvement over the built in IDE interface. I would at some point like to pickup a Fast SCSI to SATA adapter, but I have enough options. The SCSI2SD 5 isn't fast and in general is slightly slower than my physical SCSI drives. The 6 promises to be a lot faster but I am okay not with a one drive per device. I also kind of like have a removable media drive as I can swap OSs just by swapping the card. You can do this with the new version of 6, but can't do it with the older version I have.


________________________________
From: rescue <rescue-***@sunhelp.org> on behalf of Stefan Skoglund <***@agj.net>
Sent: Friday, October 20, 2017 4:09 AM
To: ***@sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [rescue] SATA on SPARC systems

Post by Eddie Cottongim

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2017 22:07:37 -0500
Subject: [rescue] SATA on SPARC systems ::WAS:::::Re: Saved this Ultra
10 from Central Mich U Surplus Sale
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
I have them on my personal archive.
Not that I have spent a significant sum, but I have purchased several SATA
controllers, and have not had luck yet on SPARC base systems.
I'm up for another round of this if everyone else is.
If someone has a HDD controller in their SPARC system, with SATA drives
*successfully* hanging off of it, please share.
Jerry

Forgive this rather long post, but SATA-with-SPARC and the Ultra-10 in
general are worthy of it!
Since 2013, I have been using a SUperSSpeed S301 SLC SATA drive as the
primary drive in my 1993 SPARCstation-10 (!), via
an ACARD ARS-2160S SATA-to-68pin-Ultra160-SCSI adaptor drive-size box, in
turn via an Antares Microsystems 20-050-0061
single-ended Wide-Ultra-SCSI SBus card, all mounted internally without any
case mods needed.
This is *waaay* faster than even 68-pin Wide-Fast-SCSI rotating rust HDDs
attached to a SunSwift SBus card. This is in spite of
the fact that the SS10 (180MHz CPUs on 40 MHz mainbus with 20 MHz SBus)
cannot drive the SSD disk at anywhere near it's maximum
I/O rate... it is still vastly better than an HDD.
Although there several makes of SATA-SCSI adaptor, due caution is needed.
Addonics made a truly awful one, couldn't get much better than 600Kb/s
and 75 IOPS through it, even with an SSD, which rendered it a rather
pointless item - my 1996 direct-attach SCSI HDDs (Quantum LPS525S) can do
that!
There are also several models from ACARD, all are either pretty good or
*very* good. The ARS-2160 and ARS-3120 adaptors are handy because they are
compatible with both LVD SCSI and Single-Ended SCSI, which gives extra
flexibility when choosing the SCSI HBA card you'll need.
Only thing to watch out for is to get the right connector-variant: the
ARS-2130S and ARS-2160H use 80-pin SCA SCSI connectors, whereas the
ARS-3120 (no "S")
and ARS-2160 (no "H") have 68-pin SCSI connectors - which is most likely
what you would want for internal drives/cables in an Ultra-10 etc.
Downside is that these adaptors are not cheap (although compared to HDD
prices way back in 1993, they are!).
https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2160-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-160mb-68pin~26221

[Loading Image...]<https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2160-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-160mb-68pin~26221>

2.5" SATA device to SCSI-LVD/160mb 68pin - SPAN.COM<https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2160-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-160mb-68pin~26221>
www.span.com
b Buy Acard Bridge Box ARS-2160 2.5" SATA device to SCSI-LVD/160mb 68pin at the best price B; Same / Next Day Delivery WorldWide -- FREE Business Quotes

Post by Eddie Cottongim

https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2320-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-320mb-68pin~26223

[https://www.span.com/images/products/i/productinfo/iael232h.jpg]<https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2320-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-320mb-68pin~26223>

2.5" SATA device to SCSI-LVD/320mb 68pin - SPAN.COM<https://www.span.com/product/Acard-Bridge-Box-ARS-2320-2-5-SATA-device-to-SCSI-LVD-320mb-68pin~26223>
www.span.com
b Buy Acard Bridge Box ARS-2320 2.5" SATA device to SCSI-LVD/320mb 68pin at the best price B; Same / Next Day Delivery WorldWide -- FREE Business Quotes

Post by Eddie Cottongim

You might be able to grovel some up on ebay or Amazon a little bit cheaper.
At the risk of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, you would want a
"Sun-bootable" SCSI card to go with it - one with OpenBOOT Forth ROM chip,
rather than a PC-BIOS ROM chip. Several "PC" SCSI PCI cards will work, but
only for secondary storage, not to boot the system. If you are going to
HVD SCSI is not supported by the adaptors and will damage them.
One thing to watch for when doing this in a Sun SPARC system, the Solaris
"poweroff" command doesn't explicitly flush SCSI device buffers, so will
sometimes
cause filesystem corruption. For my SS10, I wrote a small C program that
issues "SCSI flush device buffer" commands, and edited the /etc/rc5 script
to invoke it
as the last thing it does before "init" cuts the power - and then remember
to use "init 5" to power-off the system rather than "poweroff". Using "init
0" then manually
flipping the power-switch is also OK, "init 0" *does* issue an explicit
"SCSI flush device buffer" command to SCSI disks.
The alternative to this all this malarkey would be to use an SSD with a
supercap.
For the Ultra-10, there is also a rather complex graphics situation (two
differently-behaving versions of the on-board ATI Rage chipset, depending
on motherboard revision -
the original ones cannot do simultaneous 8-bit and 24-bit colour so can
result in colour-flashing; and some users maintain that the on-board
graphics performance is usable
but just barely). Long and short of it is that getting either a (vertical)
Sun Creator UPA graphics card or a Raptor-GFX8P PCI graphics card (Solaris
2.6 and later have built-in
drivers for those) is a much better bet. In principle you could even put a
single-board UPA Elite-3D card in there, but that might be going a bit too
far!
Finally, if anyone wants to take my spare 440MHz Ultra-5/10 CPU (with 2Mb
L2 cache) off my hands, drop me a line. It reliably long-term overclocks to
472MHz with just a couple of OBP commands.
Regards,
Mike Spooner
http://mbus.sunhelp.org

The Rough Guide to MBus Modules<http://mbus.sunhelp.org/>
mbus.sunhelp.org
This site is a reference-guide to CPU configuration of MBus-based computers, and a reference-guide to the available MBus modules. This is not a general guide for the ...

Post by Eddie Cottongim

_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

rescue Info Page - SunHELP<http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue>
www.sunhelp.org
Discussion about the rescue, restoration, and upkeep of old computing hardware. This list was formerly dedicated to Sun equipment, but now discussion on any old ...

Post by Eddie Cottongim
Thanks, there's some really good info in there.
As best I can tell, using these adapters mostly hinges on having or
finding a LVD/single ended ultra SCSI sbus card, which seems pretty hard
to find. The HVD X1065A is cheap and common but not much help.
I haven't seen a way to use a SATA drive adapter yet for fast-wide scsi,
which I think would be the situation on a SPARCStation-20 or using the
fairly easy to find SunSwift card (the SS-20 having the further problem
of the 80 pin SCA connector). On my SS-20, I used the 50 pin connector
intended for the CDROM to run a SCSI2SD card, which seems to work.
By the way, on the fast SCSI front, about a year ago a new rev (v6) of
the SCSI2SD card came out which supports higher speeds and claims to
come closer to the potential 10 mb/sec fast SCSI, whereas v5 came in at
about 1.5 mb/sec. Either is probably fine for the slower SPARCs,
especially given the cost and convenience of swapping SD cards easily,
but I'd think a SATA drive would have better endurance, at least. I
haven't tried this newer version yet but if I do I'll post a comparison.
Eddie

The Narrow scsi connector is the narrow face of the same bus ie with
that one you basically have a wide-to-narrow adapter on the system card.
The computer's connection to the scsi-bus is between the wide one and
the wide-to-narrow adapter.
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
rescue Info Page - SunHELP<http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue>
www.sunhelp.org
Discussion about the rescue, restoration, and upkeep of old computing hardware. This list was formerly dedicated to Sun equipment, but now discussion on any old ...
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

[Mike Spooner]

Post by Eddie Cottongim
As best I can tell, using these adapters mostly hinges on having or
finding a LVD/single ended ultra SCSI sbus card, which seems pretty hard
to find. The HVD X1065A is cheap and common but not much help.

They are hard to find, but they do exist, see
http://shelldozer.im/sbus-se-uws
A few surplus-old-computer-parts shops do have them from time to time, and
if
you are lucky, you might even see one on eBay. Just be careful because most
sellers
have no real idea of what they actually have and often mis-identify them.

PS: sorry if I seem to have hijacked the original Ultra-10 discussion into
SBus-land.

-- Mike Spooner
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue