I have an Ultra 10 running Solaris 10 - old but dependable. I've been
running two EIDE disks on it for a while - one 40GB root drive and a
120GB data drive which recently died. I want to replace the data drive
- ideally with a larger disk. However, the Ultra 10 onboard IDE
controller only supports 28-bit LBA addressing and so will not address
any disk space beyond 128GB.

I tried using a Maxtor ATA133 (Promise PDC20269) PCI card but Solaris
10 doesn't recognize it. Are there any 3rd party SATA or EIDE PCI disk
controllers out there that are supported by Solaris 10 on the SPARC
platform? If not, I guess I can just buy a replacement 120GB disk...
but I'd like to be able to fully utilize modern disk drives on this old
clunker.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks!
mikebo

HI,

m1k3b0@gmail.com wrote:
> I have an Ultra 10 running Solaris 10 - old but dependable. I've been
> running two EIDE disks on it for a while - one 40GB root drive and a
> 120GB data drive which recently died. I want to replace the data drive
> - ideally with a larger disk. However, the Ultra 10 onboard IDE
> controller only supports 28-bit LBA addressing and so will not address
> any disk space beyond 128GB.
>
> I tried using a Maxtor ATA133 (Promise PDC20269) PCI card but Solaris
> 10 doesn't recognize it. Are there any 3rd party SATA or EIDE PCI disk
> controllers out there that are supported by Solaris 10 on the SPARC
> platform? If not, I guess I can just buy a replacement 120GB disk...
> but I'd like to be able to fully utilize modern disk drives on this old
> clunker.
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> Thanks!
> mikebo
>
You could add a USB 2.0 interface and have internal or external disks, I
am not sure about firewire.

Maybe Solaris 11 would accept your IDE interface!

/michael

I'm not crazy about using USB 2.0 drives on a UNIX server - though
there is no doubt the interface would be a LOT faster than the <20Mbs
the on-board Ultra 10 IDE controller provides.

However, I'm intrigued by the possibility that Solaris 11 may include
support for 3rd party SATA or EIDE PCI controllers. But I'd like to
know for sure before plunking down cash to buy a controller and disk.

Where can I find this information? Sun has a history of supporting
stuff on Solaris X86 that is unsupported on SPARC. So is there a
Hardware Compatibility List for SPARC systems? I didn't think so...

There must be SOMEONE out there (perhaps a Sun engineer) that can
answer the question...
Thanks,
mikebo