Be careful with the wording.
You surely don't mean "Ultra" but LVD, which is "Ultra2" and above.

There does exist classic Single-Ended (SE) SCSI, which basically comes in narrow (N in Seagate wording) and wide (W) flavour and in asynchronous speed, synchronous speed, fast speed (F) and ultra speed (U). UW SE SCSI supports up to 40 MB/s.
There also exists low voltage differential (LVD) SCSI, which basically is wide only and in Ultra2, U160 and U320 speed. U2W LVD SCSI is 80 MB/s.

I have adapters from ACard, which are Ultra-Wide (UW), means Single-Ended (SE) and a firmware upgrade to raise the limit to 2 TB disks - they get close to the 40 MB/s, but are likely for above 200 €/$.
I don't have LVD adapters.

For internal devices there are basically 3 types of connectors: Narrow (50 pin), Wide (68 pin) and SCA (80 pin).

Adapters exist that let you put sata drives on SCSI. case in point: http://www.acard.com/index.files/Page385.htm
Several years ago, they were in the realm of affordable. Then suddenly something happened and ebay prices went from affordable to "nucking futs". Why? I presume someone realized if they bought the last 2-3 boxes, they could re-sell them at 10x the cost.

If you have the option to NOT use SCSI. that is going to be the cheapest option. I like the idea of add-on sata cards.
U160/U320 drives are still somewhat affordable and working drives are easy to come across. that will not last much longer.

Or go for the IDE cdrom to SCSI acard adapter, firmware mod it and use a SATA to IDE converter on it together with a SATA SSD 😁

Here's some reading about that https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/conve … aec-7726.38935/

edit: CF card is also possible.

Going SCSI -> IDE -> SATA sounds like a a recipe for madness. But it's still a heck of a lot cheaper than those $200 adapters mentioned. I'll have to pick one up and tinker with it

K.I.S.S.

Keep it simple, stupid. SCSI notoriously doesn't play nice with adapters. Double so with cheap adapters.

This is coming from someone with a literal bookshelf stacked with hard drives, and an entire shelf dedicated to SCSI. If a sata card is an option, it's going to be the cheapest and easiest way. Of you really want to dive into the deep end, it can be fun, but expensive.

CursedSilicon wrote on 2024-04-17, 19:05:

Going SCSI -> IDE -> SATA sounds like a a recipe for madness. But it's still a heck of a lot cheaper than those $200 adapters mentioned. I'll have to pick one up and tinker with it

Like most things, It works best if you know what you're doing. One catch though, going narrow requires high byte termination on the acard. there's an EEVBLOG forumpost about that.
and you don't have to go SATA, IDE-CF adapter also works and those tend to all be passive, ie 40 pin IDE connector to CF connector.

Have fun.

This is one of the reasons I don't have my older Unix workstations out and used very often: SCSI drives are loud.

You have the various (slow) SCSI emulators for 5 and 10mb/sec scsi1/2 (depending on if they are sync/async) but above that (eg even for basic wide SCSI) the prices get insane.

Putting an SGI Octane on a 5mb/sec emulated SCSI drive didn't sound like fun.

I'd love a simple scsi to ide converter to plug in cf cards or even pata laptop drives in to these older systems, but the old acard adapters are insanely expensive and very much hit and miss in their capabilities - I went though about three variants of acard adapters trying to get a big IDE drive working on the fast SCSI 2 interface of an Amiga accelerator about 10 years ago. It was far too expensive and difficult in the end and I gave up.

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-04-18, 07:17:

This is one of the reasons I don't have my older Unix workstations out and used very often: SCSI drives are loud.

Not all of them.

In particular the 9-18GB Seagate Cheetahs and 18-36GB Quantum Atlas IV are about as quiet as mechanical HDDs can get. The 1.7GB unbalanced jet engine emulator in my Sparcstation 20 died and I replaced it with a Cheetah 10k 9.1GB. Not only is the system vastly more responsive, but it's quiet too, with a pleasant hum as opposed to the previous scream. I have an Atlas IV in my dual P3 system and it is equally fast & quiet.

So it might be worth shopping around. I've been fortunate in recently coming into a pile of those Atlas drives, so should be good for quite some time yet.

Nonetheless, there's definitely value in the idea of a community-designed solid state device or adapter to something contemporary like that.

dionb wrote on 2024-04-18, 07:53:

Not all of them. […]
Show full quote

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-04-18, 07:17:

This is one of the reasons I don't have my older Unix workstations out and used very often: SCSI drives are loud.

Not all of them.

In particular the 9-18GB Seagate Cheetahs and 18-36GB Quantum Atlas IV are about as quiet as mechanical HDDs can get. The 1.7GB unbalanced jet engine emulator in my Sparcstation 20 died and I replaced it with a Cheetah 10k 9.1GB. Not only is the system vastly more responsive, but it's quiet too, with a pleasant hum as opposed to the previous scream. I have an Atlas IV in my dual P3 system and it is equally fast & quiet.

So it might be worth shopping around. I've been fortunate in recently coming into a pile of those Atlas drives, so should be good for quite some time yet.

Nonetheless, there's definitely value in the idea of a community-designed solid state device or adapter to something contemporary like that.

I guess I am just now attuned to the (lack of) noise from 2.5" drives and solid state. I spent a large portion of the early part of my career with SS 5's and then Ultra 1's and the occasional SGI Indigo 2 on my desk.... and I have no desire to replicate the noise of those drives. I did buy an Aztecmonster SCSI/CF adapter a good few years ago to use as storage on a VME backplane based NetBSD system running a 68060, but the price of those was simply crazy to do that everywhere else!

My Octane 2, Indigo 2 (and a Sun Blade 1500) all now reside in my garage workbench area and only get turned on when I am in there specifically to do something with them (which tends to be only spring-summer period!).

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-04-18, 08:47:

[...]

I guess I am just now attuned to the (lack of) noise from 2.5" drives and solid state. I spent a large portion of the early part of my career with SS 5's and then Ultra 1's and the occasional SGI Indigo 2 on my desk.... and I have no desire to replicate the noise of those drives.

Believe me, neither do I. The drives I mention are no noisier than a good 2.5" drive (and the frequency of the sound they do make is lower).

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-04-18, 07:17:

I think I paid ~€30 for the acard ATAPI to SCSI adapter,
already had a TL866 eeprom programmer €100 & hot air gun €500 to desolder the eeprom
had to do some thinking on how to adjust the firmware file, hourly rate of ~€25 - €100
programmed the file to eeprom
attached it to scsi bus,
added an old IDE hard drive to acard adapter first, worked,
tested with CF2IDE adapter & 4GB CF card instead of IDE hard drive, worked,
tested with SD2IDE adapter, worked
tested with SATA2IDE adapter, worked,
max transfer I got was around 120MB/s,
I guess it's the SATA2IDE adapter max transfer speed.
even got it to work on a narrow scsi bus,
figuring out that it needed high byte termination to work
So yeah all in all it is not way too expensive,
the time and equipment needed for it,
it is just not too costly for the little enjoyment it brings,
probably cost me more than a personal months wages in all,
though I don't get payed during my personal hours.

While i'd like to test the real acard ATA-SCSI adapters or other IDE2SCSI adapters,
there is at present no incentive for me to pay the amount that is requested for those adapters,
those are just way too expensive for me at present.

Anyway, the link on 68kmla will give you some more info if you want to give playing around with the adapters another try.

Enjoy !

Boot the Sun boxes over the network using NFS.
That way you can use your existing modern storage, and the lack of SCSI drives goes away.

Keep the size of the NFS shares realistic - I've found that with older versions of Solaris installing packages can fail with "insufficient space" caused by code that spits out it's dummy when faced with terabytes of free space.

I've managed to netboot Solaris 1.1.2, 2.3, 2.6 and 7 - for various reasons: mainly backup and restore of legacy kit (day job), and because I can (hobby). This has been with IPX, SS5, SS10, Ultra5/10. I've got an Netra240 that's waiting for similar treatment.

I did get pointed to this article that popped up recently

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/st … -computing-fans

Might have to reach out and ask for a few 'review' samples

They ignored me. I tried like a month ago.

for older systems older scsi2sd v5.2 or zuluscsi v6/rp2040. I avoid the ones that boot linux because you gotta do the whole load-up/shutdown mechnism so you dont corrupt the images.