[Sunhelp] Purchasing Sun Ultra 5 for learning/testing. -Need recommendation

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Kevin Fujinami wrote:

> I am planning to purchase a Sun Ultra 5 with the 333Mhz chip , 2mb of cache,
> and 128mb of RAM.  I want to learn more about Solaris operating system, sun
> hardware, and install web servers and oracle databases.

Good machine.  I'm typing on one right now, identical config.

> Does anyone have any comments on the Ultra 5 box?  will I need more memory?
> or any other suggestions?

For serious DB work memory will help.  Even with the relatively fast
internal IDE drive (7200RPM) swapping seems to hurt performance more than
with SCSI disks.  An inexpensive Symbios 53c875 SCSI card would be the
first thing I would recommend if you think you will expand your storage or
get faster disks.

The Ultra 5 has been bashed a lot for it's PC-like attributes, but the
fact remains that it provides a lot of power for the cost.

-James