July 07, 2016 posted by Martin Husemann

When I got my Sun T1000 machine, it came with a ~80 GB hard disk - good enough for a NetBSD installation, but a bit challenged when you want to use logical domains. Time to expand disk space, or maybe make it faster? But these 1U server machines do not offer a lot of room for extensions, and it is sometimes tricky to get hold of the official extension options nowadays.

So I had fun with disks and modern replacements again... (after the scsi2sd adventures).

The T1000 were offered in single 3.5" disk configurations (this is what I got) or with two 2.5" disks. The mainboard has two sata (sas?) connectors. But the disk tray in my machine is not usable for mounting two 2.5" HDs.

But: the machine has a spare PCIe slot:



and we support NVMe, so why not put a M.2 module in an adapter card in there? I tried and failed. I learned that the T1000's PCIe x4 slot is PCIe version 1, but modern NVMe modules do not fancy working in anything older than PCIe version 3.

Too bad, but whatever. I switched things around, my amd64 desktop machine got a faster "SSD" (i.e. the NVMe), another machine got the SSD freed from there and I ended up with a spare 128 GB sata SSD.

Now the T1000 had a sata connector free, but no way to place the disk and no power connector for it. The mainboard had a legacy 5/12V jack and the single disk used a strange power/sata connector:



but of course that could be replaced easily. I cut a Y-sata power split and one legacy 5/12V power connector from an old (broken) PSU and soldered a dual sata power connector cable that connected to the jack on the mainboard.

I found a small cavity in the at the front of the machine in the sheet separating PSU and disk from the fans and mainboard. Big enough to push a sata power connector and a sata connector through! So I just glued the SSD at the bottom of the chasis in front of the fans (it should be low enough to not harm airflow significantly):



It was a bit tricky to fit the custom power cabling and the standard sata cable alongside the disk, and I hope the disk will not get too hot to unsolder the connectors ;-)

Hardware service technicians would hate this, as usually the T1000 offers really easy and fast hard disk replacement, but I suppose no one but me will ever deal with hardware failure on this particular machine.

Now thats it, fast base system on SSD and plenty of space for other LDOMs data on the second disk:

mpt0 at pci3 dev 2 function 0: Symbios Logic SAS1064 (rev. 0x02) mpt0: interrupting at ivec 7c0 mpt0: Phy 0: Link Status Unknown mpt0: Phy 0: Link Status Unknown scsibus0 at mpt0: 63 targets, 8 luns per target scsibus0: waiting 2 seconds for devices to settle... sd0 at scsibus0 target 0 lun 0: disk fixed sd0: 111 GB, 114474 cyl, 16 head, 127 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 234441648 sectors sd0: tagged queueing sd1 at scsibus0 target 1 lun 0: disk fixed sd1: 1863 GB, 1907730 cyl, 16 head, 127 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 3907029168 sectors sd1: tagged queueing

Unfortunately the machine is louder than hell, and even though the rack is in our basement, the sound level is still irritating elsewhere in the house (massive stone walls, old style german construction). My wife officially hates the T1000.

Now that the hardware is ready, it is time to get it fully supported and import the LDOM management/utilities. I need to find time and help Palle!