Re: Looking for hard drives for Sparcstation 20
On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 12:52:58PM -0600, Art Haas wrote:
> Hi.
>
> About a year ago I got a SparcStation 20. The machine has two internal
> hard drives, each 1 gig. I put Debian Woody on it - worked like a champ
> of course - and fiddled around with the machine for a while.
> Unfortunately the disk space on that machine is just so limited that I
> haven't done much with the machine lately, so now I'm wanting to get
> some larger hard drives for the machine and update my installation.
>
> The machine needs to use SCSI drives with an 80-pin connector, and the
> drives must be skinny - about 1" high or so. I've hunted around a bit
> for drives like this, but not found much other than the drives Sun
> offered for the machine way back when, and the largest of those was
> about 4 Gig. I'm wanting to get at least 10 Gig per drive if possible.
>
> I'm hoping that some of you can suggest a few places to look for drives
> for this machine, or can recommend a specific drive or two in
> particular. Thanks in advance.
Forgive me if this doesn't apply to your situation at all, but I agonised
over this for a short while, a long time ago, and tried to hunt through
the 4 zillion used scsi drives available on ebay, but in the mean time
I needed a bunch more disk space _right now_ so I set up an NFS mount.
I use a super cheapo 566MHz celeron system as a gateway/firewall/stepping
stone for my network, and I thought I would use part of the hardly
used 80GB drive on there temporarily. Turned out to be way faster than
any local drive, so now I switched the whole machine over to NFS root.
Much faster machine all around, for building/compiling, you name it.
I still end up using only about 6GB on the serve-ette, and I have a
little script to spin down the local drives during the bootup. I keep
the kernel on the local drive, so it boots off of there, then mounts the
root off of NFS. Works great. Just thought I would share this bit o'
knowledge with the list. It's also super quiet after it spins down the
local drives.
Caveats: you have to have another system on when using your SS, you do
need to have a 10/100 card (I got a cheapo bigmac based card off ebay).
Added benefit: when you backup your server, you backup your SS.
a
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