Archiving workstation hard drives

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

Ethan Dicks wrote:
> On 1/19/07, Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com> wrote:
>> >How about Solaris/SunOS?
>>
>> never tried that.  interesting - is solaris (or sunos) more tolerant?
>
> Never tried it with Solaris, but Sun used to ship SCSI drives based on
> ESDI bridges, etc., that I doubt supported the SCSI IDENT packet.  I
> have a couple of these old disk boxes around, but I have yet to try to
> use one - I'd rather wrestle with the OS than some cantankerous disks
> when I can find embedded SCSI drives from a similar era (I still have
> a few 200MB Maxtors, for example).

They used to use the ACB4000A SCSI-MFM bridge (in Sun-2, and
early Sun-3), then the Emulex MD-21 in Sun-3, and early Sun-4.

The ACB-4000A is weak on the command side, and doesn't support
IDENT...  the MD-21 was better... not sure on IDENT, but it was
'more standard'.  Although I wasn't able (at the time anyway) to
get an MD-21 working on a PC ISA SCSI card.... I ended up getting
an MD-25A (late prototype I believe from an (ex?) Emulex employee).
The MD-25A worked great on the PC, and I used it to drive 4 300M
Micropolis ESDI drives in an external case... they appeard on 4 LUNs
on 1 target...  I thought that was awesome back when I did it (1 G on a 
PC...
for a great price (the drives were free... only had to buy the case and the
MD-25)).

I still have several bridge controllers around...

-- Curt

>
> SunOS, unlike Linux, isn't as particular about certain details (like
> the whole IDENT requirement).  It's not that Linux _couldn't_ support,
> say, an ACB4000 w/MFM drives, but AFAIK, it never has., even back in
> the old days (I started with 0.97 with an embedded SCSI drive).
>
> -ethan