[geeks] Bootable SATA for SPARC: has anyone tried a Mac card?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Sep 18, 2008, at 12:55 AM, Micah R Ledbetter wrote:

> When poking around online, it seems that the only card that people  
> know of that supports SATA for Solaris/SPARC is the LSI SAS3041X-R  
> 4-port SAS RAID card[0], which is still $150-200[1]. However, there  
> are some Open Firmware cards which are bootable on the PPC Macs  
> like the FirmTek SeriTek/2SE4 [2] - also expensive, at $200 - or  
> the Sonnet Technologies Tempo SATA card[3], an $80 2-port internal  
> SATA 32 bit PCI card.

The LSI card you mention isn't the only card supported.   I believe  
that if you look through some of LSI's other cards, you will find a  
few more supported models.  And some of those models are cheap from  
time to time on ebay.  One in particular is often under $75.

However, has anyone established that they are actually bootable?   
There is a difference between a Solaris driver and bootable.

That said, I have never heard of a Mac card working directly.  In the  
case of graphics adapters, Apple's openfirmware is definately  
incompatible with Sun's.  I think the same is the case with other  
cards, but someone would have to try.  Sometime after I get a new  
mac, maybe I'll try it with the card in my mac now.

> My question is, has anyone tried such a card on SPARC? My  
> particular application doesn't even require Solaris drivers, just  
> ones for OpenBSD (preferred) or Linux. I want to add hot swap  
> capability to my Sun Blade 100 with something like this[4] or that 
> [5] device which takes up a 3.5" external bay (of which the Sun  
> Blade 100 has 2) and contains a hot swappable 2.5" SATA drive, or  
> this[6] device which takes up a single 5.25" bay (of which the  
> SB100 has 1) and contains up to 4 hot swappable 2.5" SATA drives.

Have you considered using some sort of solid state IDE device to boot  
from?  You can get a 2 gig IDE flash drive that connects directly to  
the motherboard header for about $50 from logicsupply.com.  Use that  
for a root filesystem, then use whatever SATA card you want for your  
other filesystems.  The emphase units are very nice.  I haven't tried  
them with IDE based Sun's yet, but so far they have been extremely  
compatible supporting every mode imaginable in an IDE harddrive, so  
I'd imagine it would work.  I'll have to get another one to try in a  
U5 someday though.