[Knezzen]

Like the thread subject says; is/was there any bootable SATA PCI cards available for SGI's and particularly the Fuel?
I'm getting a Fuel this weekend and it would be wonderful if I could make it boot from a SATA SSD.

[Raion]

No.

[silicium]

What about an expensive Acard SCSI to SATA converter ?

[kubatyszko]

What about an expensive Acard SCSI to SATA converter ?

That might work, but the converters are in $200-$300 range!.

If you *really* want to boot over SATA, you could clone (xfsdump -> xfsrestore) the OS drive to the SATA one, and modify /etc/fstab to have kernel mount that one at boot - but very few people ever do this, and reliability of this solution hasn't been established.

[necron2600]

Regarding Acard scsi to sata bridges.. 200-300$ was a couple years ago. Its more closer to 10x time that price now for some unknown reason (ebay/amazon searches).

[gijoe77]

the ACARD SATA to SCSI cards are bootable with a SSD, I use them in my o2 and Tezro - nothing special to get them to work, the system treats them like any other scsi disk. They appear to be closer to the $2k price range now because someone seems to have cornered the market with them

[Irinikus]

Is the performance improvement significant enough to justify the price?

[jan-jaap]

Is the performance improvement significant enough to justify the price?

No, production of these things ceased, and ever since the price doubled every other month.

A SATA SSD works pretty well for a system disk of course, but it's still held back by the U160 SCSI bus. Ian Mapleson did some benchmarking.

[Irinikus]

Is the performance improvement significant enough to justify the price?

No, production of these things ceased, and ever since the price doubled every other month.

A SATA SSD works pretty well for a system disk of course, but it's still held back by the U160 SCSI bus. Ian Mapleson did some benchmarking.

Thanks for confirming what I thought. It would be a totally different story if you could get a PCI SATA card that worked in these machines.

I happen to have a PCI SATA card in one of my G4’s that that system can boot from.

[jan-jaap]

It would be a totally different story if you could get a PCI SATA card that worked in these machines.

You can, just not as a boot device.

In my O350 I have an LSI SAS3041X-R with a pair of 2TB SATA disks attached which gives me 4TB scratch space:

Code:

Integral SCSI controller 5: Version SAS/SATA LS1064
  Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 5 (XVM Local Disk) (primary path)
  Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 5 (XVM Local Disk) (primary path)

It's SATA-2 (3Gb/s per disk) but that's only a limitation with SSDs. IRIX also has a 2TB limit for SCSI devices (LUNs, technically). To break this you need to create an XLV/XVM volume from multiple devices each smaller than 2TB.

Code:

# diskpatch -v | grep ATA
sc5d1l0:  Disk         ATA     SAMSUNG HD204UI 0001  Serial: S2H7J9BB
sc5d2l0:  Disk         ATA     SAMSUNG HD204UI 0001  Serial: S2HGJ1BZ

You can buy those LSI adapters relatively cheap. you'll have to get creative to install the disks though. In my O350 the second module didn't have an IO9 or SCSI backplane so I mounted the SATA disks there. You can always take it external, I guess.