Eskimo North

Can anyone tell me what the largest EIDE hard drive a Sun Ultra-10 can accommodate? Are there any special requirements?

The usable size of a IDE disk is limited to 137,438,953,472 bytes or approximately 137 (marketing) giga bytes.

This is a hardware limitation of the IDE controller, because it only supports 28-bit LBA and not 48-bit LBA.

Another question then, are there any PCI bus 48 bit IDE controllers that would work in the Ultra-10 and be supported by Linux? Yea, I know that's a stretch.

I'll send you a Maxtor PCI dual IDE controller if you want to try it out, if it works you can keep it (free). I can't think of any reason why the Maxtor controller wouldn't work. All our remaining Ultra 10's have those super-high-reliability Seagate 120 Gb drives in them from a few years back.

That would be worth a try, just not sure how normal PCI controllers will function in a machine with a Sparc CPU but worth a shot.

Well, you can use Sun NIC's and usb PCI add-on cards in a PC, and you can use NIC's and usb/firewire add-on cards from PC's in an Ultra 10 (And Sunblade 1500), and I have done these things. I've just never bothered trying to put an extra IDE controller in a Sun box. I guess you could make a spiffy software raid box out of an old Ultra 10 if this controller works. I'll ship it off to you tomorrow.

The concern I have is drivers. Some PC drivers use embedded x86 assembly and x86 assembly doesn't compile with a compiler setup for Sparc nor do x86 instructions execute well on a Sparc CPU. I appreciate the opportunity to try it. Thanks.

The controller chip is a Promise PDC20296. With luck, the driver is written in C or portable assembler. In any case, if it doesn't work, it was free for you, and I'll only be out a couple bucks in postage. I'm sure I'll be bothering you about getting my domains moved from HE, so to be able to buy goodwill for a couple bucks is a great opportunity ;^)

You don't have to buy my goodwill, I'll do my best to assist you with that regardless.

Controller is appreciated. If I can stick a couple of large IDE drives, like 640GB Seagates, I'm going to use the box for a disk based backup of other machines so we can make backups more often than we do now with tape, and have faster access to the data when needed. Even IDE drives will be a lot faster than tape.

I knew that. I remember how helpful you were with similar things back in the dialup days, and how patient you were with a friend of mine who just never seemed to be able to get a clue at all.



Sounds like a good idea. Since it's a dual channel controller, you could stick four drives in and run software raid and get some additional peace of mind.

Tape recovery always seems to be a "god, I hope we don't really have to do it" proposition. And with drives you can use rsync to do your backing up, which is super fast.

Having a machine with a large amount of space; even if it's slow; makes a whole host of things possible. We can keep backup partitions for things which are critical which can be used via NFS in an emergency while disk restoration is taking place for example. Many things which are not an option become possible. An ability for users to be able to retrieve their own files from an online backup would save us from some grief when a user does an errant rm -rf directory, or goes to delete a file that starts with '*' (yes people have done that).

Giving users direct access to a read-only backup is a great idea! If I'm not mistaken, ZFS has a very clever way of doing this built in.

Well, the bad news is that I tried that controller in the Ultra-10 and unfortunately neither OpenBoot nor Linux recognized it, the Linux being Aurora 2.99 which is a Sparc port of Fedora Core 3. So far though that's just with the pre-built distribution kernel; 2.6.23 I think, I haven't tried building a customer kernel on it yet, because I ran into other problems, initial installation got eaten by a hard drive going south; second attempt and the CD-ROM died. I put another CD-ROM in it, and ran into a really strange problem where Linux boots off of it, but when install runs it doesn't recognize it.