[SPARCbook] Wanted ADTX adapter

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 08:07:55AM -0400, Michael wrote:
> Hello,
>
>> I'm looking for a adtx 2.5" hd adapter to upgrade my 3gx If anyone
>> has a spare??  Would consider hard disk as well.  Does anyone know
>> the maximum size hard disk that can be used with these?
>
> IIRC the maximum disk size with these things is 8GB. It certainly
> worked for me with a 6GB Toshiba but others with bigger disks reported
> problems.

There were at least two different models of these IDE<->SCSI adapters.
The earlier ones had the 8 gig limit, and were reportedly slow.  There
was a newer one that supported more of the ATA extensions & speeds,
which got the disks up to at least the SCSI-2 speed of the bus they were
connected to.  They also did not have the 8 gig limit.  I don't know how
large you could go, but the one I got let me use a 20 gig drive w/o any
problems:

$ uname -a
SunOS tadpole 5.6 Generic_105181-34 sun4m sparc Tadpole_S3GX

$ df -k
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0        61615     17960     37494  33% /
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s4     18641505   5815821  12639269  32% /usr
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s3       246463     45172    176645  21% /var
swap                    234172         8    234164   1% /tmp


>> Also looking for a copy of tadpole solaris 7.
>
> Ebay or Tadpole. Solaris 2.6 HW 5/98 will be a lot easier / less
> expensive to acquire though. 5/98 comes with full SPARCbook support,
> other releases work but will need drivers from Tadpole to use power
> management, graphics and so on.

Which is what I'm running, as shown above.

> You may want to consider Linux or NetBSD too, at least if you plan to
> use any PCMCIA hardware that's not ATA ( like wireless networking ). I
> finally got around to add full PCMCIA support, audio ( output only so
> far but at least something ), CPU power saving and so on for NetBSD,
> an accelerated driver for XFree86 is almost there too.

I'm planning on changing this over to NetBSD once your patches are in
the main distribution.  I've been meaning to ask, will they make into
2.1? or 3.0?

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org