long term reliablity computer boards

Hmm ... *that* should have better reliability. Assuming that they don't have the problem that some CF (Compact Flash) cards have when used for computer boot drives instead of camera media. They have a limited number of write cycles, so if you are booting from them and running a lot of things which write all the time, you will eventually run out of write cycles and it will get to be unreliable. If the solid state drives have gotten around that, they sound great. What kind of speeds do they offer?

Enjoy, DoN.

Very unlikely to work for machine control purposes. USB has a very high latency delay, so even if you manage to successfully fake out the software and tunnel everything over the USB to the ISA emulator, it will be extremely slow, way too slow for any kind of bus-in-the-loop or realtime application.

You see the same problem even with USB-serial adapters - send blocks of characters and everything is fine, but try to have two devices interact character-by-character and the latency kills you.

I know I have a couple. Let me make sure they don't go to something, and that they are good and I'll email you. They are the small footprint Dell USB style

Much obliged!

Gunner

"Somewhere a True Believer is training to kill you. He is training with minimum food or water,in austere conditions, day and night. The only thing clean on him is his weapon. He doesn't worry about what workout to do--- his rucksack weighs what it weighs, and he runs until the enemy stops chasing him. The True Believer doesn't care 'how hard it is'; he knows he either wins or he dies. He doesn't go home at 1700; he is home. He knows only the 'Cause.' Now, who wants to quit?"

NCOIC of the Special Forces Assessment and Selection Course in a welcome speech to new SF candidates

Hmm ... according to that, it is not EIDE but rather SATA. Which means that I could not use it in my old Tadpole SPARC based laptop. (That wants SCSI anyway, so I am still SOL with that. :-) But for other things, it would suffice.

Enjoy, DoN.

There are PATA to SATA interfaces for $20 to $30 that plug directly into the solid state drives, and use the standard 4 pin molex & 80 conductor EIDE cables. There also 5.25" bays to slide the SATA drive into, so a drive could be pulled out of one computer and stuffed into the backup machine to get right back to work. The solid state drives are less susceptible to vibration, use less power, and have a five year warranty.

Yes -- but this still does not deal with my need for a larger SCSI interface drive -- in a SPARC based Tadpole laptop. There is not room for one bridge card in the drive caddy (the SATA to PATA) let alone a second one to convert it to SCSI.

Certainly good for systems which use SATA, or even PATA with the appropriate bridge card. I didn't notice prices on the drives, however -- and that might be the killer for me. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

They are under $100. Not out of the question for a machine tool repair.

Do you need some SCSI drives? I may have a few left.

Agreed.

Thanks, but I've got plenty of SCSI drives (2 GB up through about 50 GB) in the more common 3-1/2" and some still in the 5-1/4" sizes.

What I need for the Tadpole is something like 2-1/2" SCSI drives (which of course means that the connector is non-standard for SCSI drives, because a full 50-pin IDC SCSI drive connector is longer than the width of the drives. The only maker I have found still in production is one with IDE drives with a converter module which all fits where the drive would normally go.

And these days, I'm using quite a few FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop) drives.

Thanks, DoN.

No problem. I don't have anything that uses SCSI these days. I did find an old Plextor PX--W124TSe external CDROM/burner while looking for the other drives. I did find a Quantum Viking 9.1 GB drive, PX09L011 that I got from a computer store that was closed a couple years ago. It uses the smaller 68 pin connector. I have a similar drive I pulled from a dying HP XP system with a bad motherboard. It was a secondary drive, with a PCI controller card. I don't know if I should hang on to them, or give them away. :(

O.K. That does not sound like anything which would fit the Tadpole, which is the only one which is a problem for me.

Thanks much, DoN.

I think the Ultra 10 I have has an IDE controller card, and I don't plan to fix the dead motherboard.

The Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 were unusual ones in that they were aimed at the low budget end of the SPARC machine spectrum. Thus the IDE drives.

The Tadpole was made during the SCSI-only period -- and unfortunately the drives which I have are rather small -- with the largest being either 2 GB or 4 GB -- a bit of a squeeze for Solaris 2.6, even before I start putting in my suite of programs. :-)

The connector for external drives is one which was apparently used on some earlier Mac laptops -- an angular square 'D' with a grid of pins. Luckily, I was able to find cables from this to standard SCSI connectors -- but a laptop which *needs* an external disk box is a bit awkward. :-)

Some later SPARC systems may use SAS (SATA) drives, but the period which I am using (except for a couple of U-10s and one U-5) are either SCSI or FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop). The FC-AL drives will let you hook up to 125 drives on a single interface -- though they must slow down if you are trying to use many of them fast at once. But

Enjoy, DoN.