SUMMARY: 3rd party ATA/SATA controller for Sparc?

Overdue summary, sigh.  Many thanks to those who responded, in no order: 
"NoUCE" ; Matt Clausen ; "Fabio".

Suggestions include workarounds (below) but it seems there is no 
known/recommended controller which actually lets you do this. 
Absurd/insane might be one phrase that comes to mind, but such is life.

Workarounds include,

-"don't get complicated", buy SCSI disks. (on ebay they can be had quite 
reasonably it seems?)

-use an external HW Raid Disk Array for IDE drives-to-SCSI-bus. Many 3rd 
party solutions exist in this vein and work well.

-use an external USB 2.0 drive cage and then chain the drive(s) on 
thus.  If the sparc machine lacks onboard USB 2.0, 3rd party USB2 
controller cards **do** appear to exist for Sparc platform (apparently 
anything based on NEC UPD720101 should work fine).

-In theory, use external firewire drives would be a good workaround, 
except -- as far as I can tell -- solaris doesn't yet support "mass 
storage devices" on firewire bus.  Gee, how interesting.

For the moment, I've given up on the prospect of easily adding 
on-hand-spare 200gb IDE drives into the legacy sparc machine in question 
as an easy way for inexpensive bulk storage.  I'll probably cave in and 
buy an old model IDE-to-SCSI raid array

Hope this material is of use to someone, somewhere, sometime.  If ever 
there is a big update (gasp, working 3rd party PCI IDE controllers that 
work on sparc?!? :-) I'll repost another summary at a later time.


--Tim Chipman
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