[SPARCbook] Report from the field - the Tadpole Drive sleds are a great investment!

[Ken Hansen]

Hello all,

I recently (two weeks ago) ordered a few drive sleds, they came at the end
of last week, and I wanted to let folks here on the list know what I got,
and what I think of them.

BTW, the price was $35/each, plus S/H.

First off, of the three sleds I got, two were marked for 810 Meg drives, one
was marked 1.2 Gig. These drives appear to be sleds that came back to
Tadpole because the internal drives failed (a guess)... They had *no*
external scratches/markings indicating nothing but the best of care. They
included the little circuit board/ID selector thingie so all you need is
either a large IDE drive with SCSI/IDE adapter (see
http://store.powerbook1.com/harddrives.html#scsi ) or a displaced 2.5" SCSI
HD, say, like the one left over after you buy one of the above upgrades.
Installation took all of five minutes, and my SPARCbook 3GX booted off the
drive just fine!

So what do I think? I think every SAPRCbook owner who thinks they might ever
want to upgrade their drive hurry up and get one or more now... These won't
be around for ever, and at $35 each you can't beat the price. I know of no
modern laptops that have such affordable drive sleds as these. The shipping
costs for all three was trivial, as I asked Diane to ship UPS ground (I was
not in a rush toget the sleds).

My advice:

    If you are going to upgrade your SPARCbook HD, get one now!

    If you are going to sell your SPARCbook, get one know, it will aid in
selling the unit (IMHO).

    If you are not sure, consider getting one in case, you could always sell
it on the list for cost and get you money back (again, IMHO).

    If you haven't yet, upgrade your RAM to 64 Meg - it really makes a
difference (but beware the recovery partition size on Pre-2.6 installations
of Solaris!

Hope this helps some fence sitters out there.

Ken