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Hi all,

I hope someone can give me a hint to solve my prob as googling around
doesn't show up anything usable.

At home up to now I used a UltraSparc Station 1 which died recently.
Now I purchased a second hand Sun 400MHz Ultra 5 Workstation (A21).

As I want to use my SCSI Equipment (HDD / CD-ROM / Streamer) I found
out, that there is no S-Bus integrated but PCI Slots instead.
So I need a PCI SCSI Adapter to connect my SCSI Equipment.

Now my questions:
What Adapter can I use?
Would an ordinary Adaptec AHA 2940 PCI SCSI Card work or do I have to
purchase original Sun equipment?
At the corresponding Sun page
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/U5/U5.html
I found 2 SCSI Adapter Numbers for the Single-Ended Ultra/Wide
SCSI/FastEthernet (SunSwift PCI):
501-2741 and 501-5656
The price for one of those original SUN Cards is about 299$ which is
more than I paid for the whole Ultra 5 Workstation!!

Does anybody know where to get a second hand card if the 2940 doesn't
work / fit?

Is it possible to boot directly from the external SCSI HD attached if
I throw away the internal IDE HDD (which is to small and very loud)?

Hopefully awaiting your answers,

Axel

axda@arcor.de (Axel Dahmen) writes:
>I hope someone can give me a hint to solve my prob as googling around
>doesn't show up anything usable.

>At home up to now I used a UltraSparc Station 1 which died recently.
>Now I purchased a second hand Sun 400MHz Ultra 5 Workstation (A21).

>As I want to use my SCSI Equipment (HDD / CD-ROM / Streamer) I found
>out, that there is no S-Bus integrated but PCI Slots instead.
>So I need a PCI SCSI Adapter to connect my SCSI Equipment.

Yeah, SBus has been depreciated for a while now..

>Now my questions:
>What Adapter can I use?

A SunSwift card, a Symbios 875 or 876 card, or cards made by Antares
are usually the ones used. Probably a few by Qlogic would work too,
but I'm not sure on the chip numbers that would work with built in drivers.

>Would an ordinary Adaptec AHA 2940 PCI SCSI Card work or do I have to
>purchase original Sun equipment?

Adaptec hasn't written any drivers for SPARC, and anyway, the 2940
card doesn't have any OBP ROM on it (unless you find the rare OBP
model, but the OS still doesn't have drivers for it), so you couldn't
boot from it. Sun doesn't go and write drivers for every card out
there, especially when they make 2-3 chipsets that they support
already.

>At the corresponding Sun page
>http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/U5/U5.html
>I found 2 SCSI Adapter Numbers for the Single-Ended Ultra/Wide
>SCSI/FastEthernet (SunSwift PCI):
>501-2741 and 501-5656
>The price for one of those original SUN Cards is about 299$ which is
>more than I paid for the whole Ultra 5 Workstation!!

Then get the Symbios SCSI card. Very cheap.

>Is it possible to boot directly from the external SCSI HD attached if
>I throw away the internal IDE HDD (which is to small and very loud)?

I must buy faster bigger SCSI drives than you, because most of my SCSI
drives are fairly noisy, 10k and 15k drives tend to be.

But yes, just adjust your boot path in OBP, and you can boot from
anything that has drivers/OBP support.
--
Doug McIntyre merlyn@visi.com
Network Engineer/Jack of All Trades
Vector Internet Services, Inc.

In article <5f495126.0405070345.285ef152@posting.google.com >,
Axel Dahmen <axda@arcor.de> wrote:
>
>At home up to now I used a UltraSparc Station 1 which died recently.
>Now I purchased a second hand Sun 400MHz Ultra 5 Workstation (A21).
>
>As I want to use my SCSI Equipment (HDD / CD-ROM / Streamer) I found
>out, that there is no S-Bus integrated but PCI Slots instead.
>So I need a PCI SCSI Adapter to connect my SCSI Equipment.
>
>Now my questions:
>What Adapter can I use?
>Would an ordinary Adaptec AHA 2940 PCI SCSI Card work or do I have to
>purchase original Sun equipment?

I haven't heard of the Adaptec cards working in Sun systems, but I
have a stack of Ultra 5s that I put Symbios 53c875-based host adapters
made by HP for their Kayak series into and they work fine. I replaced
the stock IDE drives with 10k SCSI drives and the Suns recognized the
controllers and drives and would boot from them with no problem.

>Is it possible to boot directly from the external SCSI HD attached if
>I throw away the internal IDE HDD (which is to small and very loud)?

Yes.

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