31 May
2000
31 May
'00
9:14 a.m.
I don't know, those Ultra 80 Quad 450MHz CPU Boxes look niiiiccceee. You're
right about the overall cost/performance ratio of the older hardware, but
you also have to take into consideration how stable the machines are. Take a
$100 low end SPARCStation and $100 of used pentium hardware. You'd probably
get a faster Pentium machine (Maybe a P-90) but take a close look at the
craftsmanship of the machine. Sun's run FOREVER, they just don't fail due to
shoddy hardware designs. Early Pentium designs were REALLY buggy, even the
later models had nasty bugs (f00f anyone?) I know several companies that
kept their 486 servers, even when they were terribly out of date, because
the 486 design had been battle tested for so many years. Keep in mind that
the performance in price/performance also includes multitasking and
stability concerns.
Well, I didn't just buy it for that, I got it when
that's about what they
were worth. The only reason I payed as much as I did was because of the
SCSI S-Bus card in it.
I *really* want a SS20 w/dual SM71's or SM81's, and something like 192MB
RAM, but then I look at what I can get in an x86 box for that price and
just
shake my head. I might like Sparcs, but x86 is the
only platform Solaris
makes sense on!
Of course my dream Sparc would be a Dual Ultra 2 :^)
Zane