Largest hard drive in Ultra-10?
I've got an Ultra 10 that I'd like to replace the hard drive in. Here are the specs on it:
Motherboard:375-0009
OBP:3.31
CPU:360 Mhz
Memory: 512Mb
OS:Solaris 9 with latest patch cluster as of September
Right now It's got the 4.xx gig drive that came with it. I'd like to replace this with a much larger drive.
What is the largest drive that this system will reasonably support? So far I've not been able to find any definitive information on what size drives this system will support.
I've seen lots of posts from people here asking how to get drives working, but no responses that indicated that someone was trying to use a drive that was too big.
Is there an official answer to this question? If not, what is the largest capacity drive anyone has gotten to work in this kind of a system? Which vendor produced the drive?
Thanks :)
[914 byte] By [
] at [2007-12-20]
I just found some information that shed's some light on my question.
<a href="http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/U10/components.html#Disks" target="_blank"> http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/U10/components. html#Disks</a>
According to the information listed on this site, the largest drive that Sun sells for use in the ultra-10 is 20 gigs. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that larger drives won't work, only that their use is unlikely to be supported.
I can live with 20 gigs I guess but I'd still like to know if anyone has had success with larger drives.
Thanks :)
Lee
at 2007-7-5 >
Hello Lee,I would recommend to search <b>these</b> forums. Your questions is one of the most asked ones.Upto 120GB disks work perfectly in the Ultra 5/10.Michael
at 2007-7-5 >
I put a Seagate Barracuda Plus ST3120026A 120GB, 7200 RPM, Ultra ATA/100 8.5ms drive in my U5. The built in IDE controller supports a maximum of 137 GB due to LBA limitations.
at 2007-7-5 >
I have a ST3120026A drive and would like to place it into my Ultra 10, but I need the SUN geometry for it. Can you help?
at 2007-7-5 >
I don't recall needing any specific geometry, it was pretty much plug-and-play. make sure that your OBP and OS are up to date and the format command should see all the space available.
For reference, I set mine up as:
Current partition table (120 GB):
Total disk cylinders available: 57459 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
PartTagFlagCylinders SizeBlocks
0rootwm515 - 20583.00GB(1544/0/0)6299520[/]
1swapwu0 -5141.00GB(515/0/0)2101200[swap]
2backupwm0 - 57458111.79GB(57459/0/0) 234432720
3 unassignedwm2059 - 25731.00GB(515/0/0)2101200[/opt]
4varwm2574 - 30881.00GB(515/0/0)2101200[/var]
5usrwm3089 - 2932651.05GB(26238/0/0) 107051040[/usr/local]
6usrwm29327 - 312193.68GB(1893/0/0)7723440[/usr]
7homewm31220 - 5745751.05GB(26238/0/0) 107051040[/export/home]
at 2007-7-5 >
I did lot of experimeting with HDDs of different sizes in Ultra 5/10 and my experience is that WD 120GB drives work good and you can use them to their full capacity.
Even if you buy 160GB drive it is not guaranteed that you'll be able to use 137GB, that is an estimate based on old ATA specification and ability of IDE controller to address that amount of space (137GB limit on older ones).
Depending on geometry of the drive (even for drives smaller than 137MB) my experience was that sometimes for some drives I would get random value that was available to me, for example for some Maxtor and Segate 80GB drives I would get only 16GB available.
WD drives were consinstently recognised to their full capacity and they perform good. I have couple of them concainated so I get 200GB available for my web server which is not so bad. I also managed to squeeze 3x120GB drives in Ultra 10, so you get 360GB which is not bad at all. You can easily install 2x120GB drives in Ultra 5.
Regards.
at 2007-7-5 >
I have an Ultra 10 that I just put a 160GB drive in and the Ultra 10 is only recognizing 2Gb of it. Is there anyway around this?
nakeim,
What OS have you installed, or are planning to use?
What is your current OBP version?
You need at least an OBP of 3.25, but may as well just put it at the last version
Sun ever offered (3.31).Additionally, you're going to need to use Solaris 8 or newer.
Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7 had their own disk geometry limitations for IDE drives.
Keep in mind, glancing back through this entire thread,
that even after you get everything sorted out, you're not going to get
to use the entire capacity of your 160GB disk with the Ultra-10 IDE chipset.
A good 20% of it will never be addressable until you wipe it
and put it into a computer designed in the 21st century.
See http://www.48bitlba.com/ for a discussion on 48-bit Logical Block Addressing.
Your motherboard is a design from 1996 and 1997 and is only capable
of 28-bit addressing.
