Very Computer

Quote:> I was wondering if anyone has experience with Solaris 2.6 or 7
> on one of the new 7200rpm EIDE drives on an Ultra 5 or 10.  What
> do you think of them, compared to Intel machines with SCSI drives
> if possible.  I am trying to evaluate the Ultra 5's or low-end 10 vs.
> high end PC.  I realize that is a difficult thing to do.  The
> application we have will see a lot of write to disk (data ingestion).

Comparing x86 based Linux systems with SCSI systems (Quantum Atlas and
Seagate Barracuda on 2940UW) vs. EIDE systems (7200rpm Maxtor I think), I
would conclude that for anything that's disk intensive (in my case
accounting program with lots of small files), the SCSI based machine would
tend to be faster. YMMV of course.

Quote:> Also, has anyone purchased a SPARC system from EIS Computers. What
> did you think(company and system)?

I planned to buy 1-2 systems from EIS some months ago, but eventually
didn't due to financial constraints. However I must say that the people
at EIS were excellent, they were more than happy to provide a benchmark
machine, answer technical questions, etc. I wouldn't hesitate to buy from
them.

: I was wondering if anyone has experience with Solaris 2.6 or 7
: on one of the new 7200rpm EIDE drives on an Ultra 5 or 10.  What
: do you think of them, compared to Intel machines with SCSI drives
: if possible.  

All the PC's we have were ordered with Adaptec's 2490 UW card with UW
SCSI disks.  I haven't done any sort of benchmarking of SCSI vs EIDE,
but of the two systems in my office, both with Solaris loaded on them,
one is a PPro 200 Mhz PC with the 2490, and the other is an EIDE 300 Mhz
Ultra 10, disk accesses on the PC seem significantly faster.

That and of 12 Ultra 10's I've bought recently, 2 of the disks failed in
the first week.  I don't recall the last time a SCSI disk failed on me
that quickly, out of a couple hundered Sparc 5's/20's I've installed since
Sun started making them.

Bob Campbell                    Unix System Administrator
Scientific Computing Division   National Center for Atmospheric Research