[H-GEN] Upgrading a Sun E250

[Michael Anthon]

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My main server at work is in dire need of some extra disk space.  It's a Sun
E250 and is currently fitted with 4x9G drives that mostly contain the OS and
Oracle installation and another 2x32G drives, one of which contains the data
and the other being used as a holding area for backups.

http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/E250/spec.html is a spec for
the machine.

I have noted that the built in SCSI is only a 40MB/sec system.  Obviously a
faster SCSI bus would be a rather nice benefit to me since the poor old
machine is I/O bound a large percentage of the time when it is trying to do
stuff.  So my question is kinda multi pronged.

1.  Is it possible to install another SCSI card that can then be used to
drive the internal drive bays, and if so, what implications does this have
for the existing drives?  I can foresee a couple of issues here.  Will the
backplane design of the drive bays be suitable for the higher bus speeds?
Will the existing drives be compatible with this higher speed?

2.  What's the deal with mixing different UltraSCSI speeds?  In my research
it seems that the newer and faster drives are backward compatible with the
slower busses however I can't determine if the slower drives are compatible
with a faster bus.  Will the SCSI card simply just throttle back the bus
speed to the lowest common denominator or is it just no going to work?

I just don't have the knowledge required to answer these questions and I
can't really find definitive answers anywhere.  The whole topic of SCSI
compatibility is terribly confused, not in small part due to the number of
people out there who think they know what they are talking about when that
really don't and end up mixing their terms..  Any definitive answers would
be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
Michael


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