bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) (04/09/91)
Has anyone considered putting a larger disk into the RDI BriteLite? The BriteLite is a SPARCStation IPC in a portable case. It comes with one 120MB Winchester (the new tiny ~1.25" form factor, made for "notebook" laptops) and one 3.5" floppy drive. I have no use for a floppy, since I'll do OS installations from my Sun SCSI CDRom, and backups and other installations over the Ethernet, all at the office. I wonder whether the floppy could be replaced with, say, the new Maxtor 3.5" 535MB (unformatted) Winchester. It should be able to use the same internal SCSI and power connections as the Sun floppy it replaces, right? RDI couldn't say anything beyond "that would be an unsupported configuration" and chuckle. Battery life will decrease with the larger device, but the disk should use less power if it's accessed less. That means I should pump it full with 48MB of SIMMs to decrease paging and swapping. I also noticed that Helios has announced an SBus card that implements a V.32bis/MNP4/MNP5 modem, G3 FAX, and answering machine. I'm not sure why they didn't use V.42/V.42bis. The only external connection is an RJ11 for the telephone line. As long as I'm fantasizing, this certainly seems like the right telco interface to connect my pumped-up portable SPARCstation to the Internet :-)
bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) (04/09/91)
Sigh... My good ideas don't last very long. Date: Tue, 9 Apr 91 12:11:35 EDT From: cjj@East.Sun.COM (Christopher J. Jackson - Technical Consultant Sun Baltimore) To: bob@MorningStar.Com The floppy on the IPC is NOT a SCSI device, so I doubt this would work. If you wanted to _very_badly_, I suppose you could weld in new SCSI and power connectors for it. Then all you'd have to worry about would be the heat dissipation... :-)