SUMMARY: substituting external for internal disks

From: Carlo L. Tiana (carlo@vision.arc.nasa.gov)
Date: Thu Mar 11 1993 - 02:28:04 CST


Sun managers:
I posted:
>From: carlo@vision.arc.nasa.gov (Carlo L. Tiana)
>To: sun-managers@eecs.nwu.edu
>Subject: substituting external for internal disks
>
>Sun managers:
>I have a Sparc 1 acting as server with 2 internal 105Mb Quantum
>drives, and a couple of 2Gb external SCSI disks. Because SCSI id's
>are at a premium I was thinking of junking the 105Mb drives (or
>putting them in some Macintosh maybe) and replacing them with
>external units. Is this possible? Has anyone else done this?
>Anything I should look out for? The reason I thought I would ask
>is that the internal drives have dedicated SCSI sockets on the
>motherboard, and was wondering if this meant sd0 and sd1 have
>to be plugged into those sockets.
>Thanks very much - I will of course summarize.
>Carlo.

Every single reply said 'go ahead and pull them out' basically.
The caveats to watch for are:
-keep SCSI bus cables as short as possible
-ensure no ID conflicts
-if the Sparc 1 has no graphics card and I take out the 2 disks the power
 supply maybe underloaded, a loading resistor may be appropriate: I thought
 this was synonymous with 105Mb Quantums? :-) But seriously, if I have a
 problem with that I might just leave one drive plugged into the power and
 unplugged from the bus.
Other suggestions were:
-adding an Sbus SCSI sontroller to relieve the bus load
-reconfiguring the kernel to take more than 4 disks and losing a tape drive
 or CD ROM
-making sure the internal drives are backed up and an external drive works
 as the boot device before pulling the internal drives (time saving
 suggestion, point well taken)
Criticisms:
-this was not time critical, so should not have been on the list but rather
 a newsgroup - sorry, I apologise profusely, I do not have a local newsfeed
 (and I probably would not have the time to read the news if I did :-( )

Many thanks
To: blymn@mulga.awadi.com.AU (Brett Lymn)
To: cyerkes@jpmorgan.com (Chuck Yerkes)
To: cdr@kpc.com (Carl Rigney)
To: Won-Soon Lau <lws@ee.nus.sg>
To: Mr T Crummey (DIJ) <tom@sees.bangor.ac.uk>
To: eckhard@ts.go.dlr.de (Eckhard Rueggeberg)
To: matt@wbst845e.xerox.com (Matt Goheen)
To: "Jon Mellott" <jon@alpha.ee.ufl.edu>
To: bsmart@verdix.com
To: louis@andataco.com
To: alida!swj@uunet.UU.NET (Stephen W. Jay)
To: paulo@dcc.unicamp.br (Paulo Licio de Geus)
To: stern@sunne.East.Sun.COM (Hal Stern - NE Area Systems Engineer)
To: jdschn@nicsn1.monsanto.com (John D Schneider)
To: jdschn (John D Schneider)
To: feldt@phyast.nhn.uoknor.edu (Andy Feldt)
To: Steve Hanson <hanson@pogo.fnal.gov>
To: Christian Lawrence <cal@soac.bellcore.com>
To: "Peter D. Bille" <PETER@andataco.andataco.com>
To: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
To: babb@k2.sanders.lockheed.com (Scott Babb)
To: cameron@hobbes.intellistor.com (Neill Cameron)
To: hkatz@nucmed.NYU.EDU (Henry Katz)
To: Tom Conroy <trc@NSD.3Com.COM>
To: John DiMarco <jdd@db.toronto.edu>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:07:35 CDT