agentb
Experienced Member
Just picked up the dustiest SPARCstation 4 I've seen, "untested", and low and behold it works! I checked the voltages and they looked good. Moved the mobo jumpers to the RS232 setting. And then tried to boot. Love to see that Power-ON Reset text over the serial port! It's 110 MHz with a 32 MB stick. I programmed the dead NVRAM and tried booting off the 1.05 GB HD but I think the drive is cooked. Going to try netbooting next as I have a lengthy checklist for that and a Raspberry Pi setup for the task which I used on my SS10 and SS20.
I really like this SS4. The power supply is physically smaller, and only 50W! I love the simplicity of this stripped down SS5 (coming from the dual proc SS20), only one SBus slot instead of 3, no MBus slots. Only one HD instead of two. 5 RAM slots instead of 8 -- though having more RAM would be nice... On-board video. Only other thing to strip out would be that video which would turn it into a SPARCserver 4 hah.
Any suggestions on a drive to use? I'd like to use a 2.5" drive in hopes that it would be quieter. The SCSI connector is an 80-pin SCA. Is there an adapter that could be used to a commodity 2.5" SCSI drive? Is this SCA to SAS?
I really like this SS4. The power supply is physically smaller, and only 50W! I love the simplicity of this stripped down SS5 (coming from the dual proc SS20), only one SBus slot instead of 3, no MBus slots. Only one HD instead of two. 5 RAM slots instead of 8 -- though having more RAM would be nice... On-board video. Only other thing to strip out would be that video which would turn it into a SPARCserver 4 hah.
Any suggestions on a drive to use? I'd like to use a 2.5" drive in hopes that it would be quieter. The SCSI connector is an 80-pin SCA. Is there an adapter that could be used to a commodity 2.5" SCSI drive? Is this SCA to SAS?