[SunRescue] Q: Regarding Sun Educator promo Ultra 5 system

[Ken Hansen]

I've gotten several replies, thanks to all for your input.

I am leaning toward getting the machine (I believe the offer runs until
the end of June, 2000) but the various posts have peaked my curiosity:

    - Does this have *any* SCSI subsystem? If not, what known good
      SCSI cards will it take (Adaptec? Other?)

    - How proprietary is the RAM on this unit? Is additional memory
      *real* expensive (like SS/5 RAM, go figure!) or reasonable, like
      (PC RAM)?

    - I may have a line on a low-cost Sun PCi card (400 Mhz AMD K5-2
      w/64 Meg RAM) - nearly half-price (I hope). If I can get one of those
      boards, the unit becomes quite interesting...

    - Drive reliability - are the included IDE drives really that bad (and
break
      inside warranty period)?

    For me this machine would be a general work box, with only really hobbist
uses - but an Ultra w/24 bit graphics and 128 Meg RAM seems sweet...

Thanks again,

Ken
n2vip at bellatlantic.net

nick at ns.snowman.net wrote:

> I have a couple of Ultra systems at work with IDE disks, and they're all
> in the process of dieing.  Of about 10 total 8 have already died, and the
> ninth is on it's way.  The educational offer is a great deal, but the
> first second you can, swap that ide drive out for either another ide
> drive, or better yet, a nice scsi one.
>         Nick
>
> On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, Pres. Dan Jameyson wrote:
>
> > I took up Sun on their education discount about this time last year. I'm
> > very happy with the Ultra 5 I got... does 24b color at 1152x900, great
> > as a general word processing workstationish machine. I also use it as a
> > general unix system for the usual services and a small dbase (yes,
> > genuine old school dbase) setup.