[SunHELP] E4500 disk questions

[Dale Ghent]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Melinda Taylor wrote:

| Hello,
|
| I am awaiting the delivery of a SUN E4500 server and I need to purchase
| some disks for it. I heard that you can connect IDE disks to the
| E4500 via a PCI card, is this correct? If so can you boot from these
| drives and do they sit inside the case.

Don't bother with IDE. I dont even know if putting IDE in the E4500 is
true. MY suggestion is to get a Netra D130 and use that for your system
drives.

| I am really having trouble understanding the configuration without
| having the machine in front of me but am working through the 300pg
| manual but I am still confused. With the disk boards, it says you can add
| 4 and each disk board supports 2 disks - are the disks internal in this
| case as well?

The disk boards do hold two drives each, and they slide in a board alot on
the front or back of the E4500. The SCSI connections for these boards are
*external* though... a SCSI port on the board is supposed to be connected
to the external plug on the on-board SCSI controller on a SBus I/O board,
or a add-in card in the SBus or PCI I/O board(s).

My suggestions: Order a Netra D130 with a full 3 drives in it. Connect it
to the on-board SCSI interface on the e4500's SBus I/O board (which I
assume you have ordered as a part of your e4500). Then use SDS to
configure drive mirroring using 2 of the 3 drives in the D130, and use the
third as a hot-spare for the other 2 drives.

/dale