[SunRescue] What older sun can use these parts?

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, David Rouse wrote:

> The AIX box has five 4GB Fast/Wide SCSI II drives (IBM and Seagate 
> Barracudas), an Apple 600i CD-ROM drive, an HP DDS2 tape drive and 64MB 
> of 60 nano 168 pin parity DIMMS.
> 
> What I'm thinking is getting a sun box that would have just an internal 
> drive (for the OS) and framer buffer and then get my drives plugged in 
> as external drives. So...
> 
> * Is there an older Sun box that uses 168 pin parity DIMMS and would 
> have a Fast/Wide SCSI II external port?

Most Powermacs use buffered 5V JEDEC (168-pin) DIMMs without parity.  If
this system uses the same DIMMs with parity and they are either 8MB or
32MB then they should work in a Sparc 4 or Sparc 5.

Out of those two I would highly recommend going with the SS5.  The SS4 was
a heavily cost-reduced design with a number of "downgrades".  The SS5
doesn't have fast/wide SCSI (only 10MB/sec fast) though you can add a
fast/wide card.  Cards with just fast/wide SCSI run around $100-125, cards
that also include 100baseT ethernet are up in the $300 range (the SS5 only
includes 10baseT).

The older SS5's are still decent performers but not great by modern
standards.  I would recommend trying to find the high-end 170MHz
TurboSPARC version, or the even rarer 185MHz Fujitsu/Tatung TurboSPARC box
(look at http://www.bodoman.com/sparc5.html for some examples).  The price
is high fully loaded but I bet you could go a lot lower for just the base
unit.  These are comparable in speed to a high-end 601 or low-end 603/604. 
What's the processor in your current box? 

> * Could I get those drives to work in Sun external enclosures (CD and 
> tape included)?

No problem.  SCSI is SCSI is SCSI (unless it's SASI or ASCI).  They should
all work including the CDROM and tape drive.

Finally, you might want to consider systems where you can't reuse your RAM
as well.  Any Sun you get will be able to use your SCSI peripherals either
natively or with a cheap card in the case of the Ultra 5/10.  Since it's
only 64MB of RAM, you may find it better to go with a different system if
your price range is outside what it would take to build a decent SS5.  How
much are you looking to spend?

-James