[SunRescue] What should I look for?

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 27 May 1999, Gregory Leblanc wrote: 

> Hello there!  I've got two Sun workstations, one is a SPARCstation ELC, on
> which the monitor doesn't work, and the other is has a label that says
> SPARCstation 330, which I haven't been able to find any info on.  Regardless
> of what either of those two machines can do, they're certainly not capable
> of being a good workstation.  By good I mean one that I can run windows on,
> along with Netscape, and hopefully GNOME.  Now, my real question...  What

Au contraire.  I used a SS330 as my primary desktop for over a year
running Solaris 2.4 and it was quite usable (more so than the Sparc 1+
sitting next to it).  The ELC is even faster.  The key is MEMORY.

Get a good amount of RAM in either machine (I had 40mb in the 330 at the
time) and it will still be a good box to play with.  I ran CDE (a pig on
any machine) on Solaris 2.4 and although it took quite a while to boot up
and a little while to start applications, they were quite responsive once
they started up.  GNOME or similar would almost certainly be faster.  I
only retired my last one last year when I bought my Ultra.

The SS330 (aka 4/330) is a VME-based machine in a "deskside" chassis.  It
has a clock rate of 25MHz like the Sparc 1+ (and uses a Cypress 7C601 CPU
like the SS2) but is faster than a Sparc 1+ due in part to the fact that
memory accesses do not have to cross the sbus.  This makes graphics quite
a bit perkier especially if you have a P4 cg6 framebuffer.

There are 8 SIMM slots onboard and you may have one or two memory
expansion cards (3U VME formfactor) each with 16 SIMM slots.  With the
right jumpering and PROM revision you can use 4mb SIMMs in these as well.
You can also use the 9U 48-SIMM expansion board (used on the /310, /370
and /390), but since the P2 bus on the 330 only connects the first two
slots, you can't have a framebuffer fitted in this configuration.

IMHO it's the nicest of the "old" sun4 systems (meaning VME bus,
pre-SS600).  The downsides to it are that it can't run recent Solaris revs
(support stops at 2.4) and it sucks quite a bit of power.

The ELC is still a decent machine, but load it up with memory.  It has
very little expandability, but nearly everything you need is built in.

> would be your recommendations for a SUN workstation if I want it to perform
> reasonably well, but can't/don't want to spend a fortune on it.  I say the
> Ultra 5 on Sun's website, but I'm not sure if I want to spend two grand on
> what will probably be a toy until I can get a good office suite and
> GroupWare client for it.  Any suggestions?  Thanks,

First, get these two systems up and running and play with them.  Despite
what you might think (about 10-year old hardware being useless) they are
excellent examples of the pinnacle of Unix workstations available at the
time (the 4/330 was very fast as a server, the ELC was a terrific
cost/performance bargain).  Playing with these will get you into Sun
hardware and will tell you how much more in the way of speed you really
need.

The ELC can take 64mb RAM and run the most recent Solaris revisions.
WordPerfect, StarOffice and the like will run on it (fairly well,
actually).

If you want a faster machine on the cheap, go for a Classic or LX. 
Affordable ($300 or so for a fairly complete system including disk and
memory but not monitor), and a notch faster than the ELC (about 30-40% for
most things).

The next step up would be a Sparc 5, 10 or 20.  I'm more partial to the 10
and 20 myself (especially the 10, you can get some great deals) but if you
see a good deal on a 5 don't pass it up.  Figure on $500-800 for a
complete decent (64mb RAM, low to mid-range CPU) configuration.  Much
faster than the Classic/LX (up to 3x as fast for most things).

You can blow more money and get a kitted-out Sparc 20, but IMHO it's
better to save your money and buy a low-end Ultra which will clean the
SS20's clock as far as memory bandwidth is concerned.  Ultra-1's can now
be had for under $1500 which makes them quite attractive.  Sure, you could
build a quad-200MHz SS20 which would have more aggregate CPU power, but it
would cost a mint and not be a balanced configuration (mbus gets saturated
easily with more than 2 CPU's, especially <1MB small-cache CPU's).

Many people have chastised the deficiencies of the Ultra 5, but most of
them have been corrected (onboard video is now 24-bit and SCSI cards are
available in the $80 range).  It's arguably the best buy if you have the
money and want a desktop box.  If you can get the current academic promo
pricing, you can get a heck of a deal (360MHz/64mb/8gb for $1795).  The
$2395 config is IMHO a better value but most desktop users will not see
the improvement.

-James [never thought I'd see the days of $300 bare Sparc 20 bases]