[Geeks] Sun Kit is just BETTER

[James Lockwood]

Replying just to Geeks.

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Kevin Lee wrote:

> However SUN is not alone at make CRAP HARDWARE, I point out the U10. This is
> the most
> ugly attempt at making SUN KIT that I have seen. I thought that the U5 was
> bad but the U5 keeps
> on Running whilst I have replaced 3 U10's in the last month.  U5 IDE but
> seems reliable.
> I guess that is why we see TONS of U10's for sale on EBAY as SUN hobbiest
> DUMP them
> by the truck load.

5 and 10 are identical except for the case and PCI riser card.

> AXi/AXe heh its cheap and it works.

Reasonably.  I have no experience with AXe but the power-on circuitry for
AXi is odd.  Note that Sun has ditched driver support for some SparcEngine
approved cards (like ES1370/1371 with the audioens driver) in Solaris 9.
No, the Solaris 8 drivers don't seem to work.  Gah.

> VOTE HERE FOR YOUR WORST SUN KIT.....

Hope nobody is offended by some of these.  None of them are really
_terrible_, but some of them had bad design features or were really built
to save costs:

Sun 3/50.  4MB soldered to the board, expanding expensive.  Cycle-stealing
framebuffer.  The 3/60 walked all over it.

Sun 4/x30.  Worst wheels ever put on a computer.

Sun 4/4x0.  Damn hard to get reasonable SCSI performance.  Funky.

SparcStation SLC (and to a lesser extent the ELC).  Cool idea but not cool
running, heat death was a way of life.  16MB RAM limit of SLC was painful
given that even the SS1 could handle 64.

SparcStation 4.  Ok, it was cheap.  The "workstation" power supply was
absolute garbage though and didn't retain power state.

Ultra 150.  Bill knows why.

Ultra 5/10.  Built to a cost and it shows.  I can't fault them for using
cheap parts as they WERE cheap, but I wish that Mitac had done better work
with the case.

> ps: since all sgi stuff us just too kewl (i do not own any sgi stuff any
> more) it can be excluded.

Indy with Nidec powersupply.  Urgh.

> pps: About 3 months ago I decided it made more sense for me to have hardware
> with interchangeable parts
> as if a customer called me I would always have a spare of some sort.

_THIS_ is the problem with x86.  Stockpiling parts from even one vendor is
an amazing trial as they play card-revision switcheroo.

-James