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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

Is there a clever way of hooking SSDs to the SCSI ports of these old computers?

Already done: https://www.redrocktech.com/products/scsi-drives

There are also Fibre Channel adapters for these if you have the XIO-PCI card cage. Can boot from it with some special magic IIRC, but a local SCSI drive is fine for most things.

How much are the adapters? I don't really see prices on that site.

Sorry the FC adapters are original SGI gear, you would have to hunt for it.

Actually IRIX works with old Adaptec PCI FC cards, but to get it running you need to recompile the kernel with some arcane, undocumented parameters. Back then when I was a regular of comp.sys.sgi.* newsgroups, Alexis Cousein gave me the trick and saved my day when my official SGI card died.

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...

It might have actually been Adaptec PCI in an SGI XIO-PCI card cage, memory is failing me. Definitely some dark magic required on Irix and on the FC switch and storage target side.

Yes, that's right. I had an XIO FC board in my O2000 that died, and I had spare Adaptec FC PCI cards for PCs. I had previously noticed that the SGI PCI FC cards for O2s or O200s were actually the same as the Adaptec, physically, but with an SGI ROM.

So after my XIO FC board died, I added an Adaptec board to my O2K to get my RAID array back online (the whole company was out of work because of that failure).

However though the card appeared in "hinv", it didn't work... After I asked for help on the newsgroups (the system was out of maintenance...) Alexis sent me a private email with the necessary invocation of the kernel rebuild command, and it worked like a charm from there.

I'm planning to use a SCSI2SD adapter for my old IRIS stations:

https://store.inertialcomputing.com/product-p/scsi2sd-v5-st3...

Instead, you should netboot them, and run nfsroot; works with irix so I suspect it will work with linux; dhcpd will inform of the tftp location of the kernel and pass the right parameters, should be doable and faster, more reliable. Now what I wonder is if X11/Xorg supports any of these framebuffers.

It's not like nfs has parity with a local posix-compliant filesystem. O_APPEND for example is inherently racy and emulated on nfs last I checked.

But sure, if you're just tooling around, nfsroot is convenient.

I've seen SCSI adapters of many types - SD card ones as well, don't have any direct product I could link, google pulled up many avenues - including this: https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/upgrades/sgi-%28silicon-graph... though didn't see SGI on list, so hard to rabbit hole that one without using live chat perhaps and may well be a legacy placeholder that time forgot.

Though network booting and storage may well be an easier avenue and cheaper. If you already have a NAS, that may well be the easiest path.

The on-board NIC in an octane is 10/100, so network anything will be painful.

It's possible to install gigE, but you will need a PCI-X shoebox and also a NIC with compatible firmware. Not super easy to find.

How so? I’ve never seen a gigE port that didn’t also support 10/100.

I mean, 11 mb/s is hilariously slow. Much, much slower than the native SCSI drives

You will want gigE if you are going to do anything interesting over the network on an Octane.

Especially given great 15kRPM SCSI drives could peak over 200Mb/sec

The Octane had a PCI card cage option so it's possible you could add a pci sata card.

You can’t boot off of it.

Sticking /boot on a normal old SCSI disk and then putting everything else on a SATA SSD would be compelling.

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