[rescue] tape drive with no SCSI

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

Dave McGuire wrote:
> 
> On November 7, George Adkins wrote:
> > <joke>
> > heh heh, that's funny, a Sun with no SCSI...   hahaha...
> > </joke>
> > what?
> > they make Netras with Ignorant Drive Electronics?
> > Crap.
> 
>   Yes, it's a little scary, but...check this out.  The Netra X1 is a
> 400MHz UltraSPARC-IIe in a 1U rackmount chassis with two 10/100
> reefernet interfaces, and it ships with 128MB of RAM and a 20GB
> [crappy IDE] disk...for $1000.00.  My application is almost entirely
> memory-based so the IDE doesn't bother me all that much, aside from
> the purism issue.
> 
>   That's a LOT of bang for the buck.

Not bad at all!

The real problem with IDE is that the drivers need to be properly
written - sounds like (according to what I pick up on the web) that
hasn't happened for Solaris.

You can get equivalent performance and equivalent CPU usage out of IDE
as long as you are in UDMA-2 mode or higher.  See if you can find out
what PIO or UDMA mode the Netra is running at.  If you can change it,
you might get both a performance boost and a decrease in CPU usage when
banging the disk heavily.

./patrick