[rescue] replacing an Ultra2

[Bill Bradford]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 07:33:22AM -0400, Mark Brown wrote:
> It's funny you say that Bill, and the main thread - replacing an 
> Ultra2.  Heck - I just upgraded to an Ultra 2 from an Ultra 10/440/512. ;-)

The main problem with the B100/150 is the anemic L2 cache on the CPU, and 
the horrible IDE performance.  Maybe they're better if you put a SCSI card
in, but I wouldn't bother wasting money on one. 8-)

My remaining SPARC system(s), other than the T1K, are a pair of U10s.  Both
are 440Mhz/2M L2.  One is all-SCSI (DVD-ROM and HD) with 1G RAM and the
other is all-IDE with 768M.  (if anybody's interested in the IDE one, let
me know..)

> The downside (for any scsi host) is the cost of storage.  I used two 
> 10Krpm 36Gig internals in the ultra 2 plus a Linksys NSLU2 (Slug).  I 
> installed uNSLUng on the Linksys and loaded the NFS stack.  Performance 
> is ....well - mediocre, but seems to be reliable.
> But power is cheap for this thing - 20watts for two 80gb ide disks in 
> fanless external enclosures,and 2 watts for the "slug".

I've got a Dell SC420 minitower (P4 Celeron 2.53Ghz, 1G RAM) at home that
does nothing but backups.  I'm trying to find someone who will swap me a
small-form-factor system for it (500Mhz or better, with 512M or 1G of RAM);

I want to find a SFF box and make all the disks into externals with a 
bunch of SATA-to-USB2 adapters I've got here.  Even counting the external
disk power supplies, I'll use less power in the end.

I'm down to only having three systems on 24/7 at home - my desktop iMac,
my wife's Windows box, and my backup server.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford 
Houston, Texas