SCSI - Which one?

[jtelep]

Building PC's with any type of IDE drive is a cinch right? As long as your firmware supports the size of the drive and the MB accepts the connector you're golden. Switch to SCSI and it's a whole new mess. A SUN Ultra 30 workstation was recently donated to me in the hopes that I could use it to learn Solaris 10 and have a chance to mess around with all of it's new bells and whistles however it had no hard drives in it. I am trying to figure out what I need and after looking up the system on SUN's website it originally shipped with some 68-pin 4.2GB SCSI Ultra 3 LVD drives but when I try to find these things the biggest size I can find is 9.1GB. I would like to put either a pair of 18 or 36GB drives in it and at least mirror them but I don't know exactly how to go about doing that because all of the larger drives are listed as either U160 or U320, no LVD, some are 68 and some are 80-pin and I am really getting lost. All I am looking for is, based on what I pulled from SUN's website and what I don't know about SCSI, how to go about getting larger drives in this thing. Will it support U320? Is the number of pins the only thing I have to worry about as far as compatibility is concerned? Is there some sort of hard and fast rule pertaining to SCSI when it comes to number of pins or can I use some sort of adapter?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[RebateMonger]

There are a couple of important things about SCSI drives.

One is the pinout. Another is the drive height .Be wary of older 1.6-inch high drives in some bays. Recent drives are 1-inch high.

Another is that all the high-speed drives are either 68- or 80-pin models. The 80-pin ones (also called SCA) are built for hot-swap applications. But you can get cheap adapters to go from an 80-pin drive to a 68-pin cable.

U320 and U160 drives are all LVD. SE went away with the original Ultra SCSI and Ultra Wide SCSI. Either drive type should work fine with an Ultra 3 (Ultra 160) SCSI controller. Given what you are doing, U160 or U320 won't make any notiiceable difference to you.

Here's a reference chart on Wikipedia.org.

Note: All my recent experience is in the Intel world. I haven't touched a Sun in fifteen years. I don't know if Suns are any different.