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

[Pres. Dan Jameyson]

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.

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.

Dan

-- 
Dan Jameyson (jameyson at amist.org)                    www.amist.org
President and Chairman of the Board of Directors
American Institute of Science and Technology          PO BOX 27934
A California Public Benefit Corporation     Concord, CA 94527-0934