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

On Sun, 3 Oct 2010, Hessel Keegstra wrote:

> 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.
>

Yes that's the best way to go I think for something quiet and reliable.

> 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.

Ah I thought it was something like that which was causing some drives to 
show in OBP but not appear when 'format' is run.

> 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 :-)

Ah thanks for the tip about that - yes I have done a low-level format on a 
146 GB drive a little while ago and that took quite a lot of time.

>
> 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.

Yes they are getting rare. I have been lucky to get the odd one or two 9 
or 18 gb units which I keep aside for older systems such as my Sparc LX 
that doesn't have room for installing drivers with adaptors on the back.

Craig.

-- 
Craig Dewick - Wollombi NSW Australia - Web: http://lios.apana.org.au/~cdewick"
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