> I would think that a good target would be machines > that are cheap and plentiful on the used market > > That is, U10, U5 ( maybe ), B100/150 > > my 0.02CAD , Desktop support would be a must
Basicly I am on your side. Those are almost for free on ebay ($10 end price). They are also very power-efficient at the first look. And at the second look they are even more power-efficient, because you cannot use them for serious work on the Solaris 10 or higher kernel and bundled fat colorful gtk-based userland. Therefore you won't power it up frequently and save even more electricity. They are unsuitable for development, except for a few small modules. If you want the best deal (very cheap, yet powerful) pick a Blade 1000/2000 (identical), with cu cpu's (with re-enabled refetch-unit), with at least 4GB of mem and 2 FC-AL disks, then maybe plug in a USB2.0 card with Nec-chip, and there you are: Premium performance at $250,-. You may have to pay 200$ more, but you save years and can actually use it. Note that, while its power-supply is 670W, the box only consumes about 250W in average use. This is still 5-times the amount of what a SB100 needs, but, as said before: You can use the box for serious (big) projects. Blade1000/2000 with dual x7009a, x7017a or x7310a offers the best SPARC-value you can ever get at that price. I have them all, the all the others are lame in comparision. Most notably the U5/U10 (cmd646 bottleneck). But also U30/ Dual 450 U60 or quad 450 U80 are very damn slow, when compared to the Blade 1000/2000. According to spec.org the (higher-clocked) Blade 2000 even outperformed the fastest SB1500_Red and SB2500Red. Because the SB1000/2000 ships with modules, which contain the *real* US_III/US_III+ inside (the actual die is even pin-compatible to the US_IV+). It is not a shrinked-to-death cpu like IIi.orig, IIe or IIe+ (aka IIi 2nd). It is a real CPU :-) The opinion of somebody who has all Sun ws models since the SS20 as test boxes at home (except for the more expensive IIIi based more recent models SB1500, SB2500, U25 and U45). Martin -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
