SUMMARY: Fast SCSI-2 on a SPARC/2???

Lawrence Houston (houston@felix.geog.mcgill.ca)
Thu, 15 May 1997 02:45:47 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 13 May 1997, Lawrence Houston wrote:

> Does the SPARC/2 support Fast SCSI-2 Drives? Recently installed a Fast
> SCSI-2 HD (FUJITSU M2949S) in our SPARC/2, but "scsiinfo" still ONLY
> reports "Synchronous(4.0MB/sec)"! On the other hand Fast SCSI-2 HDs on
> our SPARC/10 reports the expected "Synchronous(10.0MB/sec)". Is this a
> Hardware or Software Limitation with the SPARC/2 (SunOS 4.1.3)?

Many thanks to the following people:

"Edward C. Zimmermann" <edz@bsn.com>
Sean Ward <seanw@amgen.com>
Brad Young <bbyoung@amoco.com>
Tom Mornini <tmornini@infomania.com>
Farul <fg@bb303tn02.cpmc.columbia.edu>
Mike Frisch <mfrisch@saturn.tlug.org>
Donald Molaro <molaro@canuck.com>
Glenn Satchell <Glenn.Satchell@Uniq.com.au>
Andrey Ryzhov <Andrey.Ryzhov@Japan.ml.COM>
"David M. Davisson" <davisson@emuni.com>
John DiMarco <jdd@cs.toronto.edu>
"Andrew R. Tefft" <teffta@erie.ge.com>

It was unanimous: The SPARC/2's onboard controller can NOT operate at the
Fast SCSI-2 Transfer Rates (10MB/sec) and will ONLY deliver transfer
SCSI-2 Transfer Rates (4 MB/sec)! According to Edward the other SUN
Machines break down as follows:

"SS1, SS1+, IPC, IPX, SS2 are SCSI-2
SS10,SS5,SS20 are Fast SCSI-2
The Ultras are Fast Wide!"

When the SPARC/2 entered the market place in 1990 Fast SCSI-2 Drives were
NOT yet readily available, hence its limitation at the SCSI-2 Level!
There was also mention of adding a FAST SCSI-2 S-Bus Cards such as the
"FSBE/S card (p/n 501-2015)" and/or "SunSwift", but John thought a SPARC/2
might still NOT be able to fully perform at this level?

Lawrence Houston - (houston@felix.geog.mcgill.ca)