Le lundi 04 octobre 2010 C 14:27 +0200, T. Ribbrock a C)crit : > On Sun, Oct 03, 2010 at 03:48:32PM -0400, Alexandre Gauthier wrote: > > I would like to cast my vote for an Ultra 10 as well -- I have one as my > > DNS server. The main reason would be that it accepts commodity x86 > > hardware (memory, hard drives, cdrom drive, VGA output), so spare parts > > aren't that difficult to find :) > > Well, yes it does, but there are catches: The IDE controller is > notoriously slow (not even DMA, IIRC), which is one of the reasons why I > use(d) my U10s with SCSI-drives.
Oh, I did not know that -- the U10 I use is mainly a DNS server, it feels slow-ish, but IO never became a bottleneck for its workload so I never really noticed that. Now that you mention it that would explain why CVS takes forever to update the source tree :) > The case is a nightmare - you have to > turn the whole thing upside down just to open it - very annoying in some > situations. And how they managed to make it that difficult just to swap > a HD is anyones guess... :-} Ah yes, that is indeed horrid, I had sort of pushed that out of memory as well. > Also, there is at least one series of U510 motherboards that suffers > from "dying capacitor syndrome" - the buffer caps of the CPU will start > bulging and leaking and subsequently cease functioning, causing the > machine to become unstable. So far, I've had three of these motherboards > going bad, all the same revision. The slightly younger one I have in my > remaining U10 seems to have different caps - here's to hoping that they > last longer. > I did not know that either! Mine has been running fine for years so I wasn't aware of that risk :( > > > Its power consumption is acceptable, > > My experience: My U10/440 when I still used it as home firewall cum > server with 1xSCSI and 1xIDE was about 80W idle. Less than the U1 I was > using before but some 10W more than the dual PIII/600 I replaced it > with - which was also faster and less noisy. > > *If* you go for an U10-like machine, I'd look at an AXi-based machine as > well - same CPUs, same memory, but UW-SCSI instead of IDE and the mobo > is ATX-formfactor => can be mounted in a case of your choice. For some > odd reasons, however, information about them is hard to come by - even > Sun seems to hide it... > > Oh, and another data point: I did experiment with EIDE-controllers in > the U10 at some point (Promise ATA66 and ATA100) and that seemed to work > fine. At least OpenBSD didn't have a problem with that - you do need > another IDE drive to boot from, though. > Thanks for the useful info :) I will keep them in mind if I ever have to pick a cheap sparc machine again! -Alex
