[rescue] eSATA or firewire in Solaris Sparc system

[Jerry K]

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





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 > > 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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