[SPARCbook] Sparcbook 3GX -Upgrade

[Greg]

Dennis Hayes wrote:

> Question:
> (1) Where can I purchase 10G IDE HD for 3GX system? Tadpole price is
> expensive. If someone
> installed different vendor HD, what issues or problems?


I purchased an IBM IDE 10GB laptop drive from the cheapest dealer I
could find.  I then used an old SCSI<->IDE adapter from the Tadpole
disk that came with my 3GX but it only was able to address 8GB of
the disk.  I later bought a 6GB drive from the Apple shop
(powerbook1.com?) that Ken mentioned and swapped its newer
SCSI<->IDE adapter with the older one.  It then could address all
10GB of the disk so I used growfs to expand the last filesystem to
use the extra 2GB of space.  The new adapter also performs significantly
better than the old one.  The 6GB disk with the old adapter then
went into my other 3GX.

Moral of that story: you need a modern SCSI<->IDE adapter to use
more than 8GB of disk.  The older ones will work but cap the disk
size to 8GB so you'll have wasted space.


> (2) Where can I purchase Solaris 2.7 for Sparcbook. Again Tadpole too
> expensive.


Tadpole's the only place to purchase it.  The Tadpole-specific extension
packages are not available elsewhere so if you care about power
management, how hot the processor runs, or want the Tadpole tools then
you have to get it from them.  For Solaris 2.6 they put their packages
in the Sun "SHWP" (HardWare Partners program) release so everyone could
get them.  For Solaris 7 they didn't do that but there have been rumors
that they would put the packages on their ftp site after a while.  I
guess that "while" hasn't happened yet.

Plain Solaris 7 will work if you don't need X11 and I was running that
for a while before I purchased the Tadpole release.  It ran hot so I
hacked the idle loop code to "pause" the processor just like it does
after you install the Tadpole packages.


> (3)I would like to upgrade from 128M memory to 512M or better 1G memory.
> Where can I
> purchase compatible memory for 3GX? Are there any known issues that I need
> to be aware of?


I *wish* I had 128MB!  64MB for a 3GX is easy, 128MB is very hard and/or 
expensive.  Anything else just isn't going to happen.

-greg