[rescue] eSATA or firewire in Solaris Sparc system

[Brian Deloria]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Jerry K <sun.mail.list47 at oryx.cc> wrote:
> We had a discussion a while back, which, among other things, discussed an
> eSATA controller for Solaris on Sparc.  Part of the discussion is pasted
> below.
>
> I am currently in a place at $HOME where I would like to be able to add an
> eSATA card to an older Sparc system for low cost storage.  I just went and
> Yahoo'ed the Silicon Image Sil3112 & 3114 controllers below, and from what
I
> can tell from the images, these controllers would be for internal storage,
> not external storage.
>
> Is anyone on the list using these?  If so, for external storage?
>
> If this isn't possible, my second choice will be to look for a compatible
> IEEE1394/firewire 1 or 2 HBA.
>
> TIA for any comments.
>
> Jerry
>
>
>
>
>
> ====================================================================
>
>> > USB - ick. I've tried that a couple of times; last time, I had a 500GB
>> > USB 2.0 drive on the Mac Pro, and the throughput was significantly
>> > lower than network I/O using CIFS over gigE. No, USB is for keyboards,
>> > mice, cameras, and thumb drives, not for real storage. I took the
>> > drive out of the case, trashed the case, and installed it in the PVR,
>> > which made my wife very happy.
>
> One word... FireWire  :)  I never buy an enclosure without it, and never
> use USB 2.0 on Macs if I can help it.
>
> Moreover Solaris 10 fully supports FireWire PCI cards (at least FW400)
> out of the box, so you can theoretically use it on a SPARC if you are
> feeling adventurous  :)  Notable that Sun's x86-64 workstations have
> FW400 as standard - Sun like FireWire, which makes sense since they
> make a point to make real technology that works well available where
> it matters.
>
> Also, Solaris 10 has support for a limited number of SATA controllers,
> including (but not limited to) Silicon Image Sil3112 and 3114, and, by
> extrapolation, it supports 3152 as well as that is used on the Java
> Workstations. Using that you could probably pickup a low-cost ESATA
> PCI card and hang the SATA disk off the back on it's native bus.
>
> --
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>

You should just be able to get a dongle that adapts the internal port
to the external and puts it in a nice pc expansion slot bracket.  This
isn't much unlike the old serial ports that had ribbon cables from the
motherboard going out a card slot on the back of the case.  I haven't
tried one of these but I've seen a number of them pop up here and
there.  Give it a try I think they're $8 from Meritline.