Hardware

We currently have a Sun Enterprise 450 that we would like to use as a fileserver. However, the condition is that we need to be able to get something faster than the Sun-shipped UltraSCSI-1 (40 MB/s) interfaces. We don't care about the bottom 4 drive slots (on-board controller). I'm fairly certain the LSI2x320(R) series would be compatible, but searching on Google found a link (which I've lost) that said the backplanes are SE terminated, meaning that even if we installed a U320 LVD SCSI card, the drives would still run at 40MB/s because that is the limitation of SE (as opposed to LVD). However, since this is the only place that I've seen mention that the backplanes themselves are terminated, I'm wondering if all that needs to be done is to replace the internal Sun-shipped SE SCSI cables with LVD cables that have termination at the end of the cable.

Help is greatly appreciated! The alternative to using our E450 would be to buy overpriced HP hard drives (since rails from HP are not available separately, and the only other SCSI machines we have are HP), which I would really prefer we didn't do. Also, I'm not aware of any Sun systems that have as many drive bays as the E450 does, unless we were to buy an external array.