[Info-vax] booting vaxstation off alpha

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <kf4ch2$s0l$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> Get some SCSI disks.  Easy.  Cheap.  Solves all the issues here easily, 
> too.   Also solves the problem that without local storage you're 
> activating images and paging memory across a ten megabit Ethernet, 
> which will be ghastly slow.  Slow.  Even by VAX standards.

I agree here.  You can put a couple of disks inside the VAXstation.

Personally, I prefer to have external disks, since I can just swap them
quickly without shutting down anything.  I like the SBB concept.  There
is the BA353 which holds three of these, the so-called pizza box.  (Only
5 MB/s (i.e. SCSI) but that might not be an issue on the rather slow
VAX.  There are other BA35X which are faster and have 7 slots arranged
in a vertical stack: the BA350 (grey) is 10 MB/s (i.e. fast SCSI), the
grey BA356 is 20 MB/s (i.e. fast wide SCSI) and the blue BA356 is 40
MB/s (i.e. fast ultra SCSI).)  However, I don't think there was ever 
wide SCSI on a VAX, maybe not even fast, so go with the BA353.  (Note: 
you can put a narrow disk in a wide shelf but not vice versa.)