My original request:
> We have a lone Sun 3/50 left among our SPARCstations. It is a poor diskless
> relic among much faster and spiffier relatives and no one uses it any more.
> I have been thinking about dragging it home and getting a cheap shoebox
> for it.
>
> Our hardware guy was in the other day repairing a disk drive and mentioned
> that -- if the cabling was right -- one could use a Quantum ProDrive (or
> any other drive made for internal SPARCstation use) as a drive for a 3/50.
> He said one could use a PC power supply and the right cable to get that
> ol' machine back up and running.
>
> Has anyone tried this? Could an internal SPARCstation drive conceivably
> go onto a Sun with an external SCSI port?
And the answer is...Yes. Since a SCSI is a SCSI is a SCSI, no problem.
You would need a power supply and cabling. A PC power supply is fine --
I scrounged one from a junk PC -- but you could go the spiffier route and
buy a power supply with enclosure. As for cabling, it's a straight
pin-to-pin kind of cable, so a flat ribbon cable with push-on connectors
from an electronic house (like Newark Electronics) would do. Since I'm
all toes with little itty-bitty wires, I found a shop that'll do it for
me:
CS Electronics 3 foot flat cable => $18
1342 Bell Ave. 3 foot round, shielded => $42
Suite 3C
Tustin, CA 92680
Phone: (714) 259-9100 (voice)
(714) 259-0911 (fax)
Two things to remember: The drives need to be terminated. These are
special terminators that fit into the sockets above the connectors on the
drive. And I was reminded several times of the Xkernel implementation by
Seth Robertson that turns your 3/50 into an X terminal.
Many thanks to all who replies (see below). Special thanks go to Eddie
Brown, show answered endless questions about cables.
Mark Galbraith (deltam!flyer!mark@uunet.UU.NET)
Alex Lopez (alexl@daemon.cna.tek.com)
Eddie Brown (eddieb@EE.MsState.Edu)
Geert Jan de Groot (geertj@ica.philips.nl)
Steve Hanson (hanson@calvin.fnal.gov)
rodney@snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca
Steve Harris (etnibsd!vsh@uunet.UU.NET)
Birger Wathne (birger@vest.sdata.no)
Dan Butzer (butzer@cis.ohio-state.edu)
Paul Evan Metz (bmskc!oz!paul@uunet.UU.NET)
Gary Johnson (garyjo@teksce.sce)
Mike Jipping
Hope College Department of Computer Science
jipping@cs.hope.edu (BITNET: JIPPING@HOPE)
"From there to here, from here to there,
Funny things are everywhere."
-- Dr. Suess
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:21 CDT