[rescue] V210 rescue

[vintagecoder at aol.com]

> I keep hearing about people who happen across neat rescue stuff and
> wonder why that doesn't happen to me. (Well, part of it is that I live in
> Maine I suppose.)  

At least where you are you can drive to pick stuff up or even get stuff
shipped for reasonable prices. There are those of us much worse off than
you!

> I did finally find a couple of free SunFire V210s that were on their way
> to recycling. I've only fired up the first one of the two, and it has a
> pair of US IIIi 1GHz CPUs and 4G of RAM. I think that's pretty much full
> and will work nicely for the databases I run here. (They now run on a
> couple of Ultra 2s.)   

Congrats! I love the V210s. Lots of goodness in a tiny form factor. You can
run a lot of work through those.

> I don't, however, have any drives for these. So, I am looking for a few
> 36G drives that will fit in a V210. I have drive sleds, but these are the
> newest Suns that I have, so I'm not sure what I need in terms of drive
> specs aside from third-height SCA drives.  I'm also interested in any
> good sources for drives.   

Since ZFS consumes twice the space if you mirror I find 36G drives too
small, especially if you have only 2 bays like on the V210s. I would
recommend a minimum of the 72G and the 146G would be swell. You'll find you
have lots of uses for these boxes and you'll probably run out of space fast.

> Thanks for any pointers here.  

Me too, I could use more drives (and more cash to buy them with) but I have
no idea where to look for them other than ebay or paying retail (out of the
question) at some Sun/Oracle reseller who has NOS drives.

Now you'll be able to switch off your room heater for most of the winter!
For real economy, we recommend at least one server in each room ;-)