[geeks] Sun stuff on auction locally

[Julius Sridhar]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Fogg, James wrote:

> While everyone else is jawing about semantics....
>
> I highly recommend the SparcStation 5's and they are, IMHO, the best of the
> bunch at this auction. You will probably want more ram and disk though. The
> SS5 is modern enough that you won't have to go begging for parts, yet old
> enough to be worth very small dollars (maybe $30 to $90 depending on CPU,
> +$25 to +$50 more with monitor). They are SBus machines and use most of the
> SBus cards. They *can* be fast enough to run Solaris 8 (get lots of RAM and
> a TGX+ frame buffer). They come in models ranging from a 80mhz processor to
> a 170Mhz processor (my favorite). The 110Mhz is no slouch either. They use
> SCSI disks with SCA interfaces (not the more common 50 pin "IDE" type
> connector).
>

The 110MHz SPARC 5's are decent.  The 170MHz TurboSPARC modules are a
third party upgrade part.

> The 630MP is something I lust after, but it is a VME bus machine and parts
> are fairly hard to find, except on the Sunhelp lists. It isn't very fast, it
> isn't meant to be a workstation and is large/power hungry. It also has some
> Solaris version limitations (I don't know for sure, but I seem to recall
> that after Solaris 6 you run into problems). However, as a server they are
> still a nice machine to have, and if you judge computing power by the pound,
> its a killer. Again, they sell from zero dollars to maybe $500.00. Its not
> uncommon to find companies begging someone to haul them away for free, as
> they have almost no modern use and are expensive to send to the trash. One
> nice thing about this beast is that it is a multi-processor machine.

630MP slow?  I don't think so.  Get yourself a couple of SM81's and you'll
have a dual-processor 85 MHz SuperSPARC-based 630MP/812.  Easily way
faster than an SS5/170.

Peace...  Sridhar