roberto@bondi.phyast.pitt.edu (05/25/90)
I have been asked to put together a system asap, and I would appreciate your advice. The configuration we are considering would be: 1) SS1+, 8 Mb, monochrome, diskless 2) external SCSI drive (600 Mb or so) 3) 150 Mb 1/4" tape 4) X-terminal 5) Laser Printer (*) 6) a second hard disk, either a 300 Mb or 600 Mb unit (*) (*) this is optional, we may not have the money for it. We will probably get items (2) and (3) from third party suppliers, which brings the first question: would you care to recomend a supplier of `plug and play', idiot-proof compatible boxes (tape and 600 Mb hard disks combos) ? It's extremely important that the shoebox works with the Sparc from the start, the intended users are not very hardware oriented. Any horror stories and mention of places to stay away from would be welcome too. Also, is there something wrong with the following alternative: replace items (1) and (4) above by 2 Sparcstations 4/20, with a 600 Mb HD + tape combo in one of them, the second one running diskless. We have been running a SS1 diskless served by a diskfull SS1, in a similar configuration, and the performance seems acceptable. Will we see similar performance with two SLC's ? I'm aware of the slower floating point chip in the SLC, but it seems as fast as the one in a 4/260 (1.2 Mflops, or so they claim), and we can live with that. Lastly, has anyone hooked a LaserJet III to a Sun? I'm thinking about a LJ III with an additional 2 Mbytes of memory and a PostScript cartridge. This configuration seems cheaper than a comparable LaserWriter NTX. The printer is to be used mostly for TeX output and PostScript graphics. Thanks in advance. I will post a summary of replies if there is interest. Roberto Gomez | Arpa: roberto@bondi.phyast.pitt.edu Department of Physics and Astronomy | Bitnet: gomez@pittvms University of Pittsburgh | UUCP: ...!psuvax1!pitt!cisunx!gomez Pittsburgh PA 15260 (USA) | Phone: (412) 624-9089
lapyun@uunet.uu.net (06/01/90)
We have a lot of SS1 and SS1+ with 3rd party hard disks (from 327M, 500M, 600M to 1 G) and all of them work fine. We tried Highland Digital and InterCad. Recently Mostel and some other company sent us price quotes and they are really cheap. I believe they use the same hard drive such as Imprimis, Hitachi etc. Check with them for pricing. 300M is around 2.3K, 600M is around 2.8 - 3.0K, 1.2G is about 4.5K. (You can get the phone numbers from Sun observer, Sun Tech Journal, etc.) We use 1/4" tape drive from Sun and we don't have any experience with 3rd parties. uunet!smosjc!lapyun