Solaris

It's me again, I was taking my Sun Blade 100 apart last night to see what kind of drive I have. It is a Seagate ST320011A Barracuda ATA IV 20 GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA/100 IDE.

Now 20 gig ain't all that big anymore and I got to thinking about putting a couple bigger drives in there. although I have only one drive, there is an empty bay for another.

My question is regarding hardware compatibility with Sun. When I search online for "SUN" Seagate Barracuda disk drives, they are considerably more expensive than other Seagate Barracuda drives. For example, this one: Sun / 370-5560 / Seagate ST320011A (20.4GB - 7200 RPM Ultra ATA/100) Barracuda ATA IV -- Sun Parts from AnySystem.com
is $245.00 for a 20 GIG drive! but I can get a 750 GIG Seagate for the same price here: Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda ES ST3750640NS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

They appear to be the same type of drive...am I missing something here?

ok, since I'm talking to myself, I went to Sunsolve and pulled up the Sun Blade 100 Workstation Hardware Specifications:

Sun Blade 100 - Hardware Specifications

regarding the disk drives it says:

Internal Mass Storage
Disks Up to two 80GB, 20GB or 15GB, 7200-rpm enhance IDE disk drives

Now, are they saying that 80GB is the biggest drive that CAME WITH the Sun Blade 100? Or, is that the biggest drive that is COMPATIBLE with a Sun Blade 100?

Someone on this board has to know if I can put any IDE Ultra ATA100 in these bays...

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

...first thing you do, you tone down the sarcasm. You aren't paying for the help here.
...second, ATA drives and SATA drives are not the same thing.

IDE is IDE, regardless on which architecture they run.

Thanks. I don't have any spare drives to play with so I needed to know for sure before I buy a couple of disks. I'll be sure to be more specific with the nomenclatures when I do.

Will this one work?

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST380215A 80GB 7200 RPM 2MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM

As far as the sarcasm goes, I thought it was light hearted and was just trying to get a laugh. Wasn't trying to offend. Sorry if it did.

oops...double post.

nah.. I shouldn't post after meetings with management...

..anyway, that drive should work. I do have a couple Blades in my basement and IIRC those are the drives that I put on them, but any IDE should work.

The short answer to your question is "Yes and no"

Seriously, though, if this just a home machine and you don't have any Sun maintenance contracts on it, you should be ok.

I haven't had an IDE based machine to try this myself, but I've had a lot of my customers report success with running non-Sun IDE/ATA hard drives up to about 120GB in size successfully on their Ultra 5 or Ultra 10 machines.

However, there must be some kind of limitation because I've had a few customers try to put in 200GB+ drives and they all reported that either the drive is not seen by the OBP -- or, that the drive seen by the OBP, but not usable in the OS (i.e. can't load Solaris, etc)