Hardware

Hi,

Does anyone know if it's possible to upgrade a Sun Fire v65x to support USB external hard drive(s)? My take on this is the USB ports were designed to support keyboard and mouse funtionality. BIOS Version/Date is: Intel Corporation SWV25.86B.1191.P08.0310291543, 10/29/2003.

Does anyone know if this BIOS version would support simply adding a USB 2.0 card to a free PCI slot?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Matt

You can plug USB 2.0 devices into USB 1.0 ports and have them work. Meaning, it's not the lack of 2.0 speed ports stopping it from being detected.

Thanks, Corona688. Do you think I'm right that the reason the system won't detect the external drive is because the BIOS (from 2003) doesn't support the capability? Any thoughts on a work around?

I'd have hoped the SUN folks would know better than I would, but since they're being quiet I'll post my wild guesses.

I don't think the BIOS enters into the equation. I haven't ever played with SPARC at the hardware level, but in x86 you only need BIOS usb support to boot from USB -- not to use it in general. Once it boots the OS should have full, direct control of the USB controller.

If it doesn't, perhaps there's a way to make it so; if the USB ports are held by the BIOS for emulating old-style keyboards and mice can that be disabled? (but may be a bad, bad idea if it locks you out of any local console!)

There may be kernel drivers you need to load and so forth to get USB storage to work inside Sun systems, maybe device nodes to create if the system won't do it for you, etc.