[SunHELP] Bus speed differences

[Robert Banniza]

I use or have used both an Ultra 2 and an Ultra 60. To be honest if this
is a home machine, save the money and go with the Ultra 2. However, if
this is for a production machine, go with the U60 which is still
supported by Sun and is a faster machine. To give you a little
background, I had a Blade 100 on my desk previously. However, it was so
slow that I gladly replaced it with the U2 as it is faster and IMHO has
better RAS. In my opinion, you can't go wrong with a 2x300 U2 with 512MB
and CD-ROM drive for $405 from Ebay. That's why I bought it. The U60
would have cost in upwards of $3K on Ebay. Clear as mud? :-)

Robert

Robert Banniza
Senior UNIX Administrator
Ascension Health
Phone: 812-228-2157

>>> avriettea at speakeasy.net 01/30/02 09:58AM >>>
On Tuesday, January 29, 2002, at 10:19 AM, Bret Adams wrote:

> I have a choice between an Ultra2 with an S bus or a Ultra 60 with a

> PCI bus.  The chips and configurations are basically the same.
> Is it worth the extra money for the PCI bus?

Bus speed can make a huge difference. But it really depends on your 
application. I'll give you an example on (forgive me) non-sun
hardware.

I have a powerbook g4/500, and a g4/533 minitower. One of the things I

do at work is move multigigabyte files around through a database. This

is not computationally intense. It doesn't take particularly long to 
find the tuple it needs to return to me. However, the operation on the

powerbook can drag on up to a hundred times longer than on the
minitower.

So for a database, sure, it can be important. Think about what youll be

doing with the machine. Are you going to be moving large files around?

Are you going to be serving files rapidly? (such as a webserver)

Furthermore, I think you are overlooking other differences in the two 
machines. You may consider the actual CPU the only difference between 
the two, but its also important to understand that there are hardware 
differences. Not the least of which, the ultra60 has more room for 
expansion and is a minitower. I find that a minitower is much more 
convenient for being deployed on the "bakers racks" we see in so many 
server rooms these days.

PCI in itself is also much more prevalent on the market than SBUS.

alex
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