Can you use SMD disks on a Sun 330?

[Larry Blair]

In article <1744 at brazos.Rice.edu> ginosko!cg-atla!weber at uunet.uu.net (Jeff Weber) writes:
=X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 140, message 2 of 13
=>
=>The Sun sparcstation 330 has 5 VME slots (3x9U 2x6U).  The VME slots can
=>presumably be used for any reasonable VME board, (like a third party
=>VME/SMD disk controller) but Sun does not offer the 330 in any
=>configuration with SMD disks.
=>
=>Why? Is it that their SMD-4 controller is 9U and won't fit?  (why not? the
=>cpu takes only one 9U slot?)
=
=Well let's see.....  The install tapes are the same between 330 and 370's
=w/SMD.  The CPU is the same.  They both are VME bus.  I do this type of
=cross building quite often.  Usually you can get away with it.

The CPU card may be the same, but the big problem here is that the boot
PROM won't boot _any_ device except the onboard SCSI, not even the normal
Sun SMD and IPI.  Sun will tell you that the system wasn't designed for
it, but the real reason is that they are trying to prevent third parties,
such as Interphase and Ciprico, from selling controllers.

Btw, I've run an Interphase 4201 in my SparcStation 330.  The only problem
is that I needed to boot off the SCSI using -a to tell it to use the xy
device for root and swap.  I expect that Sun will probably make a mod in
4.1 to prevent even this!

Larry Blair   ames!vsi1!lmb   lmb at vicom.com