USB External Hard Drive for Solaris 10 Sparc

UNIX Solaris
1

Hi-

I would like to know if anyone has used any USB External Hard Drive, about 500/750GB or 1TB, with any of the Solaris 10 "SPARC" systems. Not on intel nor amd platform.

I'm looking for the compatible drive and found a few listed on Sun solaris ready page, but I'd like to have inputs from actual users and know which device is actually working before I'm stuck with something that machine won't take.

So to recap:
I need USB External Hard Drive: 500/750GB or 1TB

For this Solaris 10 system:

  • Sun Microsystems sun4u Sun Fire V240
  • System clock frequency
  • OBP 4.16.2 2004/10/04 18:22 Sun Fire V210/V240,Netra 240
  • System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u Sun Fire V240
  • System clock frequency: 167 MHZ
  • Memory size: 6GB

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

pt

2

Hi,

if it's not too late, yes i have an external usb drive on SPARC Ultra-10 with on a unsupported USB PCI Card running. It work's fine. The only thing you have to look after is that you have the USB 2.0 driver (not sure if it is correct named but it's the one that support ~480Mbits/s throughput).

That's all and yes i have Solaris 10 on that box.

cheers
Jens

PS: i would recommend to update the obp to the latest 4.16 is fairly outdated

3

What commands did you use to format and mount the drive
At sun.com, I have seen both fdisk and rmformat recommended for formatting

4

I have found out that zfs was the way to go as long as your hardware and server/patch can support the usb drive.

However, after numerous file transfers on zfs mounted drive, the system gone unresponsive and couldn't able to get to drive any more and ended up force import/export to bring all the drive back.

That was my first time dealing with zfs and was able to sort my problem for that time being.