Re: good sources of 1" 80 pin new SCSI drives

Hi,

Most FCAL drive will work in SB1000/2000 machines, even drives that do not have SUN firmware. Modern FCAL drives have the fluid bearings you seek.

However, the "cheaper" drives without SUN firmware that are available on places like eBay and others are usually drives originally shipped for large SAN arrays (EMC et al) that utilize a non-standard sector size other then 512 bytes. The non standard sector size make these drives to show up in OBP but not being recognized via format. To make these drives work, you need to low-level format the drives and for that a utility like sformat (version 3.5 is the latest - from 2001) is needed. sformat comes in source code (just google for sformat-3.5, you need GCC) or can be retrieved in binary form via www.blastwave.org. A long time ago sformat was part of the solaris distribution (or was it still called SunOS , I forgot) but is no longer shipped part of it.

sformat allows for many parameters to be set. In my experience the "automatic mode" usually works. Low level formatting a 300GB disc takes a bit of time though :-)

I am not aware of old-new stock 50 pin SCSI drives. These older drives (working ones) are getting rare. As for 50 pin drives bigger then 18GB, I dot think they exist. The bigger ones are usually 9GB, 18GB drives are rare and I have never seen any larger one. You can of course use 68pin adapters and get a modern 68 pin SCSI drive or even use common SCA drives with an adapter. 
 
Best regards,
   Hessel






On Oct 3, 2010, at 10:30 AM, Craig Dewick wrote:

> Oops forgot the SB1000 uses FCAL drives. 8-) So I need 1" high 146 fluid bearing FCAL drives that will work.
> 
> Craig.



On Oct 3, 2010, at 10:16 AM, Craig Dewick wrote:


> 
> The 146 GB Hitachi drive in my SB1000 has started to develop errors that fsck doesn't seem able to deal with so I'm looking at the option of sourcing some new 146 GB 1" 80 pin SCSI drives.
> 
> I prefer to go with drives that have the newer 'fluid' bearings as they are far quiter and run a lot cooler.
> 
> The ones I see on Ebay tend to sell for over US$200 each, which is ok if they have Sun firmware or will work without a problem with Sun's drivers. I've found some 146 GB drives that don't work properly (OBP sees them, but 'format', etc. don't).
> 
> On a related topic, has anyone come across any 50 pin SCSI drives of late that are new old-stock? They're next to impossible to find now. I have a bunch of older systems (Sparc LX, etc.) that need 50 pin drives. 1" high, preferably 18 GB or better.
> 
> Craig.
> 
> -- 
> Craig Dewick - Adelaide Australia - Web: http://lios.apana.org.au/~cdewick"
> Email: [email protected] - SunShack: http://www.sunshack.org
> Galleries: http://www.sunshack.org/gallery2 - Pantbotof and the Fading Sun at
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/navarzo3/sets/72157622209300431/
> _______________________________________________
> Suns-at-Home mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://www.net-kitchen.com/mailman/listinfo/suns-at-home