Sun Ultra 45

[igormp]

Hi everyone.

 

I'll use this space as the build log for my project using an old Sun Ultra 45. For those who never heard about it, the Sun Ultra line was a series of servers and workstations made by Sun before they were bought by Oracle, usually using SPARC CPUs instead of your regular x86 (however, some of the the last models, such as the Ultra 40, had x86 CPUs).

 

Since I'm not a fan of RGB nor windows on cases, I was looking for a nice case that was as stealthy as possible, basically a black box with a button to turn on. Sadly, case prices here are kinda expensive due to the pandemic along with bad currency ratio, so I decided to retromod a nice case. First I looked after a Mac Pro G5, but those are still expensive and the internal space to build an ATX build is basically non-existent, so I gave up on that idea.

 

That's when I decided to go for the Sun Ultra 40/45, which has way more internal space, the components reassemble an ATX-like setup (but it still has a proprietary form-factor for mobo and psu), while still looking sleek and more elegant that then Mac Pro IMO.

 

Today the system I managed to buy arrived, with the original CPU (1x UltraSPARC IIIi), mobo and PSU (1000W):

 

 

And here's a video of the fancy toolless panels (idk how to embed videos here).

 

I'll firstly need to polish and clean it up, maybe even repaint the top part since it's heavily scratched.

Then I'll try to add some mobo standoffs, since the original one isn't ATX. I'll also need to find a way to fit a regular PSU, along with trying to mod the front panel in order to use the USB and audio ports along with the power button in a regular mobo.

Lastly, I'll install some case fans along with some dust filters.

[Blue4130]

4 hours ago, igormp said:

Hi everyone.

 

I'll use this space as the build log for my project using an old Sun Ultra 45. For those who never heard about it, the Sun Ultra line was a series of servers and workstations made by Sun before they were bought by Oracle, usually using SPARC CPUs instead of your regular x86 (however, some of the the last models, such as the Ultra 40, had x86 CPUs).

 

Since I'm not a fan of RGB nor windows on cases, I was looking for a nice case that was as stealthy as possible, basically a black box with a button to turn on. Sadly, case prices here are kinda expensive due to the pandemic along with bad currency ratio, so I decided to retromod a nice case. First I looked after a Mac Pro G5, but those are still expensive and the internal space to build an ATX build is basically non-existent, so I gave up on that idea.

 

That's when I decided to go for the Sun Ultra 40/45, which has way more internal space, the components reassemble an ATX-like setup (but it still has a proprietary form-factor for mobo and psu), while still looking sleek and more elegant that then Mac Pro IMO.

 

Today the system I managed to buy arrived, with the original CPU (1x UltraSPARC IIIi), mobo and PSU (1000W):

 

 

And here's a video of the fancy toolless panels (idk how to embed videos here).

 

I'll firstly need to polish and clean it up, maybe even repaint the top part since it's heavily scratched.

Then I'll try to add some mobo standoffs, since the original one isn't ATX. I'll also need to find a way to fit a regular PSU, along with trying to mod the front panel in order to use the USB and audio ports along with the power button in a regular mobo.

Lastly, I'll install some case fans along with some dust filters.

I've been looking for one of these for a year now, where I am they still go for too much for a Modding project. I'll be watching this closely

[igormp]

30 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

I've been looking for one of these for a year now, where I am they still go for too much for a Modding project. I'll be watching this closely

I got really lucky that I found one guy in other state that wanted to get rid of a pile of those, otherwise it would have costed a leg and an arm haha

 

Couple more pics:

 

 

Disassembled it without needing to touch a single screw. Those workstation toolless designs are really a thing.

 

And here an upclose of the SPARC CPU:

[Blue4130]

43 minutes ago, igormp said:

I got really lucky that I found one guy in other state that wanted to get rid of a pile of those, otherwise it would have costed a leg and an arm haha

 

Couple more pics:

 

 

Disassembled it without needing to touch a single screw. Those workstation toolless designs are really a thing.

 

And here an upclose of the SPARC CPU:

Love the sun logo (guess it explains my avatar) 

 

Question, what is the max cooler height? Or the measurements from standoff to side panel? 

[igormp]

45 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Love the sun logo (guess it explains my avatar) 

 

Question, what is the max cooler height? Or the measurements from standoff to side panel? 

Agreed on the sun logo, it's way too sexy. I'll try to polish the case without touching the logo.

 

I did a quick measurement of 16cm. I have a gammax 400 v2 coming, I hope it fits with the acrylic panel on. 

[igormp]

Just a small update, got all the components for the new build (and already got them working). All that's left is a dremel so I can make some cuts into the case.

 

[crbowman]

On 12/18/2020 at 10:29 PM, igormp said:

Just a small update, got all the components for the new build (and already got them working). All that's left is a dremel so I can make some cuts into the case.

 

I've already done most of this mod and quite successfully though there are still a few things I want to clean up.

The original power supply is quite capable and is ATX compatible mostly.  This guy here has a great pin out: here. I bought an ATX cable extender on Amazon and that was quite easy to connect up out of the box.  My board had an 8 pin power connector so I took the 8 pin motherboard power extender cable that came with the ATX extender and bought a mating connector from from Amazon and with a pin extractor I was able to rearrange the pins on the 8 pins power supply cable to connect them to the extra power connector from the sun PSU.  My board has 8 sata channels so I bought an extra back plane from eBay like this for the upper 4 disk slots (the M2 should have this but in case your's doesn't).  I added a pair of cables from Amazon so that all 8 disk slots work (I already had the disk spuds that attache to the disk for mounting in the slots but you can find those on eBay).  Also it's easier to find AMD motherboard with 8 SATA ports.  I bought a heat sink/fan from Amazon.  I chose the Noctua NH-C14S from Amazon as I'm, currently, using an AMD 3950x and I was worried about height to the clear plastic insert in the case.  It fits fine with the fan slung under and probably would fit with the fan on top but it would be close and wouldn't have much air clearance.  I bought standard standoffs that screw in and drilled and tapped new holes in the removable tray using this drill bit from Amazon.  If I were doing it again, I buy the drill bit and tap separately as it's far to easy, using a power drill, to over tap and mess up the threads, but the ones I did right were perfect.

Here are the tricky parts.  You need to remove the CPU heat sink mount from the motherboard tray.  This was easy with a dremel.  You have to remove a bunch of the existing standoffs (not all, some aren't in the ATX mother board footprint and can be left). BUT there is one you don't want to remove as you can reuse it and it is perfect to help you locate the other points on the tray to dill and tap for screw in brass standoffs from Amazon.  I believe this is the middle standoff next to the slots.  The other standoffs inside the ATX foot print I removed with a dremel and it was pretty easy.  If I were doing this again I'd make an acrylic board using a CAD program same size as an ATX motherboard with holes drilled to perfectly fix the existing standoffs and holes perfectly positioned for drilling the new ones.  That way you could slip it down over the tray before you removed the old standoffs and drill the new holes with complete confidence they're in the right spot.  It was easy to disassemble the fan tray and replace the fans with these from Amazon and stick the cables out some of the holes in the fan assembly for connect.  At some point I'd like to create a custom cable to the board the fan tray originally connected to so that the fan assemble can simply be pulled out as originally designed.

Here's the really tricky part: not ever board is a good choice here.  The way the case is built there is more metal in the way between the top slot and the opening for the IO connectors.  I was lucky and noticed this when I fit an old board for prototyping and bought a board that has an M2 slot nearest the IO connector area.  If you don't do this you'll likely find a valuable x16 pic slot is unusable as there is no slot opening there.  you're lucky, your board looks like it will do fine, but many boards have a x16 slot where yours has the top M2 slot.

This left a few minor details.  I used my dremel to cut an opening in the board tray to allow the IO connector to exit.  At some point I'd like to go back and make this perfectly square so it will fit my IO connector metal shield that came with my motherboard, for now it's just a ruff opening I need to finish off.

If you go here, these guys have done a pretty good job of documenting the DVD drive assembly.  The pins for the connectors are there and I was able to hack a cable so the front panel switch starts my mother board.  You could also use those pinouts top connect up the power on LED (I haven't yet).  The usb pins are there and so I want to try to make a cable for my mother board so I can use the 2 front panned USB ports.  They're USB2.0 only though.  The DVD is probably a write off.  It does use an obscure by standard connector but I don't have and ribbon cable connector on my mother board.  I don't use DVDs much but I did find replacement slim slot loading DVDs with modern SATA connectors and a separate SATA to USB2/3 dongle on amazon that I could probably hack up if I wanted.  Audio connectors are documented in the link above so that just another custom cable (I'm not really good at these).  If your board had firewire the pinout are there in the link above but even I don't really have gear that uses this today. 

I'm loathsome to change the external esthetics of the machine but perhaps removing the DVD drive assembly all together and replacing it with one fo these would be simplest from a cabling standpoint and provide the modern external ports one would want, though now one has the problem of no external power switch pr power LED.  Though you could open the case and have one internal if you don't start up often.

All in all I'm quite pleased with mine.  I have an AMD 3950x 16 core machine with 8x 8TB sata drives all in an elegant case.  Some day I'l get pictures, instructions, part list and budget for this up on the net somewhere.

[igormp]

12 hours ago, crbowman said:

The original power supply is quite capable and is ATX compatible mostly.

I thought about using it, but given its age I doubt it's that efficient anymore, so I will likely try to get my current PSU in there.

 

12 hours ago, crbowman said:

My board has 8 sata channels so I bought an extra back plane from eBay like this for the upper 4 disk slots (the M2 should have this but in case your's doesn't).

My case did come with the backplane, but not with the disk holders, so I'll need to find a way to get my disks in there. Not really a problem since I don't have many 3.5" disks anyway.

 

12 hours ago, crbowman said:

I bought a heat sink/fan from Amazon.  I chose the Noctua NH-C14S from Amazon as I'm, currently, using an AMD 3950x and I was worried about height to the clear plastic insert in the case.

From what I had quickly measured, my gammax 400 should be a tad bit too tall for the plast cover in the case, so I'd have to drill 1 or 2mm off the plastic in order to make everything fit.

 

12 hours ago, crbowman said:

This was easy with a dremel.

Thank god that I bought one last week haha. It should arrive by the end of this week.

 

12 hours ago, crbowman said:

 It was easy to disassemble the fan tray and replace the fans with these from Amazon and stick the cables out some of the holes in the fan assembly for connect.

I saw a nice video modding the fan tray those days: 

He also has some other nice videos on modding the sun ultra case (specially the PSU mod that you mentioned).

 

12 hours ago, crbowman said:

At some point I'd like to create a custom cable to the board the fan tray originally connected to so that the fan assemble can simply be pulled out as originally designed.

That would be awesome and shouldn't be too hard to do. I'll give it some thought after I manage to get the basics done (mobo mounting, psu placement, io shield drilling).

 

12 hours ago, crbowman said:

Here's the really tricky part: not ever board is a good choice here.  The way the case is built there is more metal in the way between the top slot and the opening for the IO connectors.  I was lucky and noticed this when I fit an old board for prototyping and bought a board that has an M2 slot nearest the IO connector area.  If you don't do this you'll likely find a valuable x16 pic slot is unusable as there is no slot opening there.  you're lucky, your board looks like it will do fine, but many boards have a x16 slot where yours has the top M2 slot.

Thanks for the tip, I hadn't noticed that before. Worst comes, I wouldn't mind having my GPU in the x4 slot anyway, I don't really need the bandwidth for what I do.

 

12 hours ago, crbowman said:

This left a few minor details.  I used my dremel to cut an opening in the board tray to allow the IO connector to exit.  At some point I'd like to go back and make this perfectly square so it will fit my IO connector metal shield that came with my motherboard, for now it's just a ruff opening I need to finish off.

I bought a motherboard with an integrated IO shield because I thought it'd make that process easier. Was it hard to cut that opening with the dremel? I noticed that it's quite thick in there. Also, which disk did you use? I'm just getting started with the whole rotary tool thing haha

 

13 hours ago, crbowman said:

If you go here, these guys have done a pretty good job of documenting the DVD drive assembly.  The pins for the connectors are there and I was able to hack a cable so the front panel switch starts my mother board.  You could also use those pinouts top connect up the power on LED (I haven't yet).  The usb pins are there and so I want to try to make a cable for my mother board so I can use the 2 front panned USB ports.  They're USB2.0 only though.  The DVD is probably a write off.  It does use an obscure by standard connector but I don't have and ribbon cable connector on my mother board.  I don't use DVDs much but I did find replacement slim slot loading DVDs with modern SATA connectors and a separate SATA to USB2/3 dongle on amazon that I could probably hack up if I wanted.  Audio connectors are documented in the link above so that just another custom cable (I'm not really good at these).  If your board had firewire the pinout are there in the link above but even I don't really have gear that uses this today. 

The most important things to me are the power button and LEDs, which should be pretty doable.

The dvd would be a funny thing but I'd have no use whatsoever. I might still try to do it just because.

I don't really mind the audio and usb ports since the actual case sits pretty far from me on my desk, and I have a USB 3.0 hub easily available, while for audio I use my webcam's mic along with bluetooth headset. 

 

A nice thing that I'd like to do is to get usb 3.0 in there instead of the 2.0 connectors, I just have no idea if it would be as simple as getting a 3.0 connector and wiring it up, or if I'd need something more complex. Designing my own PCB's for such things would be doable, but time is always an issue haha

 

13 hours ago, crbowman said:

I'm loathsome to change the external esthetics of the machine

And so am I! I want it to look pretty stock on the outside, so I won't be touching its IO.

 

13 hours ago, crbowman said:

Some day I'l get pictures, instructions, part list and budget for this up on the net somewhere.

Please do so!!! It'd be really helpful for anyone doing a similar project, and you surely have tons of references in hand (thanks for those!)

 

 

I really appreciate all the tips you gave, I had to read it over and over in order to absorb most stuff haha It will make the project way easier for me, thanks a ton!

[RollinLower]

these systems are absolute beauties. that front grill looks like it'll suck in your pets and small children! what a beast.

[crbowman]

6 hours ago, igormp said:

I thought about using it, but given its age I doubt it's that efficient anymore, so I will likely try to get my current PSU in there.

 

My case did come with the backplane, but not with the disk holders, so I'll need to find a way to get my disks in there. Not really a problem since I don't have many 3.5" disks anyway.

 

From what I had quickly measured, my gammax 400 should be a tad bit too tall for the plast cover in the case, so I'd have to drill 1 or 2mm off the plastic in order to make everything fit.

 

Thank god that I bought one last week haha. It should arrive by the end of this week.

 

I saw a nice video modding the fan tray those days: 

He also has some other nice videos on modding the sun ultra case (specially the PSU mod that you mentioned).

 

That would be awesome and shouldn't be too hard to do. I'll give it some thought after I manage to get the basics done (mobo mounting, psu placement, io shield drilling).

 

Thanks for the tip, I hadn't noticed that before. Worst comes, I wouldn't mind having my GPU in the x4 slot anyway, I don't really need the bandwidth for what I do.

 

I bought a motherboard with an integrated IO shield because I thought it'd make that process easier. Was it hard to cut that opening with the dremel? I noticed that it's quite thick in there. Also, which disk did you use? I'm just getting started with the whole rotary tool thing haha

 

The most important things to me are the power button and LEDs, which should be pretty doable.

The dvd would be a funny thing but I'd have no use whatsoever. I might still try to do it just because.

I don't really mind the audio and usb ports since the actual case sits pretty far from me on my desk, and I have a USB 3.0 hub easily available, while for audio I use my webcam's mic along with bluetooth headset. 

 

A nice thing that I'd like to do is to get usb 3.0 in there instead of the 2.0 connectors, I just have no idea if it would be as simple as getting a 3.0 connector and wiring it up, or if I'd need something more complex. Designing my own PCB's for such things would be doable, but time is always an issue haha

 

And so am I! I want it to look pretty stock on the outside, so I won't be touching its IO.

 

Please do so!!! It'd be really helpful for anyone doing a similar project, and you surely have tons of references in hand (thanks for those!)

 

 

I really appreciate all the tips you gave, I had to read it over and over in order to absorb most stuff haha It will make the project way easier for me, thanks a ton!

Yes, the video you pointed to is by the same guy who did the GitHub I pointed you too.

 

I really like the disk spuds you can find them used here.  The 8 bay sata setup with the disk spuds is the whole reason I did this.  ZFS on FreeBSD makes this rock but Lunix with ZFS would probably do too.

 

I kept the power supply as it looks like they're pretty easy to find used.  Plenty of power though maybe more on the rails you don't need.  I really like the way it slots in and out and while I could find parts that would fit in the available space, nothing would be quite the perfect size.  I'd still have to build a custom cable to connect up the SATA back planes and it'd be a pain to find the proper connector (but probably doable with some internet searching.)  Yeah it's probably not super efficient.  Trade offs!

I highly recommend using screw in standoffs and a tap to set them in.  Once I realized that one standoff is in the right place it made that really easy to reuse the motherboard tray and get the alightment right: take out the standoffs in the wrong place with the dremel, mount the mother board on the one standoff that's in the right place and simply mark through the holes in the mother board for the right place to drill.  Make sure you shim the board to the right height so that the board doesn't droop at an angle throwing off the wholes a bit.  It's a pain when the standoffs are a little off.

 

The hard part of dremeling the opening for the io connector is getting the dimensions right.  Most of what I've cut through so far was haxagonally stippled but even the part that isn't can be cut with a little bit of patience.  I used tin snips to create an under sized ruff opening in the stippled part and then use the Dremel sanding or cutting wheels to clean it up.  Since I'm a bit of a perfectionist, I'm more ok with something being not done yet than done imperfectly.  I don't want to take the board in and out of the tray a lot to check fit, and I haven't found a really good way to mark out perfectly where to cut for the metal insert.  It's probably not to hard to get a perfectly sized opening for the insert, getting it in the right spot to align with the board when it's mounted isn't as straight forward for me to figure out.  Since you have a fixed IO shield it may be easier to mark.

 

I have thought of doing a custom board for the front panel, but as I haven't really done a board before (I'm a chip designer not a board level guy) but USB 2.0 high speed signaling scares me a bit and the black magic for USB3.0 really scares me.  I think I'm more likely to start with a board for the fan try to connect up to.  Again perfectionist.  But the audio and power and LED would be easy on such a board.  As I have the power switch working and I think the existing USB and LED would be a simple matter of more cabling I haven't worked up the energy for a custom board.  The only real use I have for USB on front is occasionally upgrading FreeBSD from memory stick.  USB2.0 would work fine if a little bit slower but I don't do that very often and while it's a pain to reach the back panned USB I could always pull the machine out for the occasional upgrade.  Plus I'm looking into FreeBSD upgrading my root ZFS partitions and so I may not even need that for upgrades.

[igormp]

8 minutes ago, crbowman said:

I really like the disk spuds you can find them used here.  The 8 bay sata setup with the disk spuds is the whole reason I did this.  ZFS on FreeBSD makes this rock but Lunix with ZFS would probably do too.

Ouch 

 

International shipping sucks, not to mention the current exchange rate for me.

 

I'm currently on XFS on Linux, any extra HDD I'd probably just leave as EXT4 anyway, so I don't need to worry about that much.

 

15 minutes ago, crbowman said:

I kept the power supply as it looks like they're pretty easy to find used.  Plenty of power though maybe more on the rails you don't need.  I really like the way it slots in and out and while I could find parts that would fit in the available space, nothing would be quite the perfect size.  I'd still have to build a custom cable to connect up the SATA back planes and it'd be a pain to find the proper connector (but probably doable with some internet searching.)  Yeah it's probably not super efficient.  Trade offs!

Find those cases and parts for it is actually pretty hard here. I thought about trying to fit the guts of my current PSU into the Sun Ultra's one, but it might not be worth it. I'll decide which approach is the best one when trying to assemble it. But yeah, the sliding system is really fancy and neat.

 

17 minutes ago, crbowman said:

I highly recommend using screw in standoffs and a tap to set them in.  Once I realized that one standoff is in the right place it made that really easy to reuse the motherboard tray and get the alightment right: take out the standoffs in the wrong place with the dremel, mount the mother board on the one standoff that's in the right place and simply mark through the holes in the mother board for the right place to drill.  Make sure you shim the board to the right height so that the board doesn't droop at an angle throwing off the wholes a bit.  It's a pain when the standoffs are a little off.

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep it in mind!!

 

18 minutes ago, crbowman said:

Since you have a fixed IO shield it may be easier to mark.

Yeah, once I get the motherboard fixed in the tray, I'll see if it's doable to mark form the inside and cut it there, we shall see how it goes.

 

21 minutes ago, crbowman said:

I have thought of doing a custom board for the front panel, but as I haven't really done a board before (I'm a chip designer not a board level guy) but USB 2.0 high speed signaling scares me a bit and the black magic for USB3.0 really scares me.

I'm currently a data engineer, but used to work in embedded. most of my designs were simple controller boards for sensor reading and such, mainly with AVRs, STM32s and ESPs, I have no idea how hard it'd be to get USB 3.0 stuff done right, but at $2 per 5 boards, it won't hurt to do some trial and error.

 

 

[crbowman]

Tried hacking up a USB2 cable cable to connect my motherboard internal USB connector to the wire from the USB port as described

here. But it didn't work.  The wires were probably too small a gage for the crimp connectors I have.  I didn't continuity test the terminals end to end and I only connected to one pair of power/gnd pins on the IO module cable figuring they're internally shorted.  I also could have gotten the data pin polarity wrong thought the wire colors matched up.  I'm not really sure why it didn't work but I'm leaning towards a custom board as I can't get the LED working either.  I see that lots of vendors have USB3 hub chips complete with example designs but this would be a much longer term project for me.   I'll probably either get an external hub to connect to a rear panel connector or I will buy one of these and try to paint it to match.  I think I might also try to chisel off the air funnels on the fan tray that were supposed to blow over the memory as they don't really line up with anything in my build.  But other than that, with an AMD 5950x I'm pretty happy with it.

[crbowman]

I tried another cable to get the front USB panels to work.  No dice.  I have the wire colors matching, I'm pretty sure they were correct but no dice.  I'm out of possible paths forward which use the existing hardware here.  I also can't get the LED to work at wiring it up to my motherboard.  I'll have to look into this more as I think it should work.  Finally the funnels on the fan try which blow air to cool the RAM on the original motherboard are really easy to remove.  I just pushed against one corner and wedged a knife place under it and then pushed back the other way.  The funnels are attached to the main assembly via some small plastic pegs that make it look like the two parts are fabricated separately and glue/welded together later.  I like the internals better without it the funnels which aren't helpful for my new board.  I think the next steps would be a replacement board for the fan tray to connect up to wither headers and a replacement board for the front panel.  I bought and examined this but it's not really a good fit, the opening on the Sun isn't the same size and it won't slot in easily.  However, looking at it, it would seem like you could make a replacement PCB that would work pretty easily.  There are almost no components on the board.  It's mostly cable with connectors soldered down.

[crbowman]

Any progress on this?

[igormp]

13 hours ago, crbowman said:

Any progress on this?

I've done all of the needed cuts in order to fit a regular ATX mobo, but I'm facing a dilemma about the PSU. I don't want to use the original one due to its age, but I'm not sure if I want to either:

- mod my actual one, by removing its fan and making its height smaller in order to not interfere with the mobo tray

- put its insides on the case of the older PSU, which has the problem of fitting all of the connectors (it's a semi-modular PSU).

- buy a sfx PSU (which costs a premium)

[crbowman]

I’d love to see the cuts you made. Have any pictures to share?

Yep the only thing that made sense to me were reuse or find a power supply that would fit in the existing space. There are some but none have the perfect fit and beautiful removability of the sun PS.  I reused the sun PS and so far it’s worked beautifully with 6 hard drives.  It’s been running for months now with no problem.  Given that I only had to remove and push around some pins on an extension cable it was a no brainer for me.  Though I don’t have a graphics card that needs an extra power connector yet since card are insanely priced right now.  Still I think I can just hack up a cable for that too.  upload some pictures. I’d love to see.

[crbowman]

Any progress?

[igormp]

19 hours ago, crbowman said:

Any progress?

Hi, sorry for the lack of updates, I haven't been able to work on the project for the last 6 months

 

I'm looking towards reusing the original PSU, and for that I'll need to create some custom adaptor cables for my GPU, CPU (which uses 8 pin) and hard drives. I plan on not touching the orignal cables, but instead trying to create "extensions" with one of the ends being regular ATX outputs.

Im currently trying to find some connectors from aliexpress to follow with my plan, but didn't have much time to do a proper search. 

 

I'll try to upload pictures of the cuts I did tomorrow, since I finally got a reasonable phone again (I had to use an older phone that I had laying around since my previous broke). 

[crbowman]

How is this going?