Very Computer

Hi,

Please advise ASAP if Maxtor 4G120J6 120GB IDE disk is supported on any
sun hardware platform. This disk is specified as having 238,216
cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors.

I have tried it on an an ultra5 (with OBP 3.31) but format command only
shows this disk as being 20GB with 41606 cylinders. I tried configuring
the disk as an 'other' type but when I enter the respective value for
cylinders the format command reports 'out of range' --- it seems that
the maximum cylinders count is approx 65000, giving a maximum disk size
of 32GB.

There are SunBlade 100 machines here that I can use to install this hard
disk onto, BUT will SunBlade 100 support 120GB hard disk.

I would appreciate if someone can advise on the best way forward here.

(The other option may be linux on an Intel platform -- would that be
feasible?)

Regards,

Ravinder Kalsi
Unix Systems Team
Brunel University

I am assuming that you are using an older version of Solaris.  You will
need to install newer SOLARIS 8/9 in order to use the drive.  The OBP, on
any of the ide machines, should have no problem with it.

Reed

On Thu, 27 Jun 2002 10:38:29 +0100

I have a maxtor 120gig drive running fine in a X1 and dual 80gig in a sb100.
As long as your drive is smaller then 137gig it will work fine in the sb100.

--
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I have seen things you lusers would not believe.
I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab.
I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate.
All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week.
Time to die.

I am very curious about the performance of these IDE drives.  I have
generally sworn IDE drives out of my life ever since I owned an Ultra
10.  I eventually installed a few SCSI controllers and then ran
everything from external unipacks and multipacks.  Back then ( 1998ish )
I didn't bother to bench the write speed of the disks or look at the
service time for those IDE disks.  These days I am working diligently on
filesystem performance for a multi-terabyte server and am using the
Seagate 180Gb SCSI disks for this purpose.  Thus far performance has
been acceptable so long as I stripe across multiple disks and multiple
controllers.  These large IDE disks are a bit of a mystery to me and I
was under the assumptions that one simply can not have more than two of
them on a controller and that performance for many small random
reads/writes that forces a lot of seeking will essentially result in a
glacier slow system.  Am I wrong here?  What sort of performance have
you seen on these IDE disks?

Dennis

Given the drives that Sun shipped in early Ultra 10s I'm not surprised.

Quote:>I eventually installed a few SCSI controllers and then ran
>everything from external unipacks and multipacks.  Back then ( 1998ish )
>I didn't bother to bench the write speed of the disks or look at the
>service time for those IDE disks.  These days I am working diligently on
>filesystem performance for a multi-terabyte server and am using the
>Seagate 180Gb SCSI disks for this purpose.  Thus far performance has
>been acceptable so long as I stripe across multiple disks and multiple
>controllers.  These large IDE disks are a bit of a mystery to me and I
>was under the assumptions that one simply can not have more than two of
>them on a controller and that performance for many small random
>reads/writes that forces a lot of seeking will essentially result in a
>glacier slow system.  Am I wrong here?  What sort of performance have
>you seen on these IDE disks?

I find that IDEs are generally pretty good.  The high end IDEs have
similar bit densities to high end SCSI so transfer data at a similar
rate when the spindle speeds are comparable.  Most of the high end
IDEs are available in 7,200rpm versions so they will be slower than
their 10k rpm SCSI counterparts.  I find the thing that lets the
IDE drives down is when you are doing simultaneous read/write.  They
read fast, they write fast but don't ask them to do both at the same
time.

One thing to note is that the IDE controllers in Suns aren't that
great.  We get better performance off the same IDE drive in a modern
PC than in an Ultra 5/10.  I don't know whether the Blade 100 has
a better IDE controller than the ancient U5/10 one.

2 drives on a controller isn't so much of a problem when so many
people do multi-controller cards.  You can also get some really
nice IDE->SCSI RAID systems.  These usually have a controller
channel per pair of drives and hardware raid control interfaced
to a SCSI channel on the back.  That way you get the best of
both worlds and you end up putting the Inexpensive back into
RAID.

--
Phillip Fayers, SunAdmin/Support/Programming/Postmaster/Webmaster(TM)
Dept of Physics & Astronomy, University of Wales, College of Cardiff.