can i add ide hard drive to sun ultra enterprise server?most documentation says only abot svsi drives... currently i have 4 scsi drives totalling about 120 gb. i bot a 300 gb ide drive. can i add this to the server ... what r the commands and procedure to add drive and mount and partition it.
thank you
Generally, the answer to your question is : NO
IDE controllers have not generally been in Sun server systems.
Why limit yourself to a maximum of 4 drives on a slow data bus?
However, you didn't tell us what model computer system you are concerned about.
It would be important to know that.
Go to the Sun System Handbook,
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/
Find your system and research it through the 'Specifications' and the 'Related Documentation' links.
Also, if I recall correctly, even if your computer system happens to have any IDE chipsets in it,
only the very newest models would have any chance to be compatible with 48bit adressing,
so you'd be limited to a maximum of approximately 137GB of usable space in the drive.
That is why SCSI and Fibre technologies have been used -- your filesystem limits are by Solaris, not by hardware.
... and as Rich has hinted, Sun does not find it of ANY value to sell IDE adapter cards.
Your E450 can hold as many as 20 SCSI drives in the internal drive bay.
Then if that isn't enough storage, you could attach external arrays to the system.
Keep in mind that IDE == 33MBps burst throughput to one disk at a time,
while generic Ultrawide SCSI is an arbitrated parallel concurrent 40MBps throughput to multiple drives,
and newer SCSI technologies are so very much faster than that..
This link is at the ArsTechnica WebPoedia, entitled [url=http://arstechnica.com/paedia/s/scsi-1.html]"What Is SCSI"[/url].
No.Nor will there ever be.
The E450 will never get any alternative disk technologies because it is a discontinued computer model.
In another year it will not only be EOL, but it will be EOSL.
SATA is still an IDE technology.
Someone found that if they did a serial attachment, they could squeeze a bit more data transfer out of the beast than if they tweaked a parallel attachment to a disk (PATA).
You're still restricted to one or two drives on a data cable.
It's fine for a desktop PC.
SCSI technology is proven, robust, and stable.
It is appropriate for a system that you must rely on, to run your business, 24-by-7-by-365.
If you need more storage than what can be installed with the E450's 20 internal drives, then get some disk arrays.
