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

[Paul Khoury]

-----Original Message-----
From: Pres. Dan Jameyson <jameyson at amist.org>
To: rescue at sunhelp.org <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Date: Wednesday, April 19, 2000 2:05 PM
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Q: Regarding Sun Educator promo Ultra 5 system


>About hard drive reliability...
>
>I remember hearing that Sun changed to a higher RPM IDE drive with the
>newer 333 and 360 Ultra5. I think they used a Seagate 4500 RPM drive
>with the original darwin series... now it's a 7200 (not sure of the
>exact brand). Perhaps the hard drive problems are with the Seagate-drive
>machines. Albeit slower than I would like, I've never had any hard drive
>problems. I'd have to pop open the top to check the exact brand (WD,
>maxtor, or quantum I think), but the 9 gig drive mine shipped with is a
>fairly normal consumer end drive.
>
Let's see - Quantum seems to be pretty good.  WD has been off
and on.  A friend in the surplus business says their Enterprise SCSI
drives are pretty good, but he too has had lots of problems with their
Caviar
drives.

IBM is good too, Seagate is iffy, depends on the drive (I remember long ago
when they had their ST40xx MFM drives, UGH - almost every one was bad).
Ditto for Conner.


>Also, for memory...
>
>There is a page at http://www.grina.com/ultra5.html which goes over some
>of the Ultra5 hardware... however, I'm almost 100% certain that site is
>antiquated for these newer Ultra5 machines (it says to use 60ns 168-pin
>EDO 3-Volt JEDEC buffered DIMM, but I know for a fact that the memory in
>mine is 50ns). So that memory may work, but there are probably faster
>alternatives these days.
>
So that means the U5 uses regular buffered SDRAM?