Ultra 10 - Usless IDE workaround?

Message

Toady · Post by **Toady** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 11:10 am

I have been getting really annoyed with the shoddy performance of the IDE disk(s) in my U10, while I was getting annoyed with it I was wondering about work arounds (Sun SCSI cards seem to be expensive on ebay in the UK).

I have an old Compact flash card (8mb and also a 64mb) and one of those IDE converters, what if I were to put the /boot (and therefore the kernel etc) onto the compact flash - could I then use any linux supported IDE controller?

Or should I give in and part with some cash for the SCSI option.

Sadly I have replaced my home server with an Intel box already - but to be fair this was more to do with running some goodies that are not avilable on Sparc hardware yet. (hardened sources, pax and dm-crypt) before anyone says it yes I know I probably could do this by hand but I would rather wait untill the 2.6 tree is sparc stable before I go and bust it all on my own. (and I just dare somone to tell me to run debian instead!!)

gust4voz · Post by **gust4voz** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 12:41 pm

Yes, you can stick one of those CF<->IDE adapters to have the kernel there and use a regular scsi card to go on booting (as in root filesystem).
I actually did this back when i didn't have my SYM and used an Adaptec for that matter.

NewBlackDak · Post by **NewBlackDak** » Sat Feb 18, 2006 8:11 am

I'm doing that something similar with my U5. We had several RAID boxes loaded with 7x18.1GB disks laying around. I set it to RAID5 with 2 online spares, popped in an Adaptec AHA-2940U2W, and the liveCD recognized it the first time. I use the internal 10GB IDE drive for /boot and /home. The array is swap, /var, and /. It's our webserver now. I look at it once a week to make sure we haven't dropped any disks!

Toady · Post by **Toady** » Sat Feb 18, 2006 4:14 pm

Thanks guys... I'll give it a go as soon as I can find my CF <-> IDE adapter..