GG.UUU@ISUMVS.BITNET ("John Hascall") (11/10/87)
Greetings fellow netters:
I am strongly considering buying a VAXstation 2000, and would greatly
appreciate any comments on the following topics:
1) Reliability
2) Performance (is it anywhere near the claimed 0.9x11/780 ?)
3) Configuration (am I forgetting something?):
6MB memory
FPU
monochrome monitor (19" or 15" [I have only seen the 19" price so far])
44MB half-height hard & 1.2MB half-height floppy (since this is to be
a standalone system removable media is required)
4) Expansion adapter (is it available as a field upgrade or does it need to
be included in the initial order? What does it consist of--the price
seems somewhat steep...)
5) Storage (how adequate is 44MB considering the size of VMS? or How soon
will I want to add the expansion adapter and a 71MB or 159MB disk?)
6) Color (If you have a monochrome system: do you wish you'd got a color
system? or If you have a color system: is it worth all the extra
money--I have seen a demonstration of a 19" color monitor and it is
just amazing--but do you use color enough to justify it?)
7) Other (anything else you can think of).
Please send a responses to me (rather than the group), if their is sufficient
response/interest I will summarize to the net.
Thank you for your time,
John Hascall
Iowa State University Computation Center
Ames, IA 50011
(515) 294-0005
GGUUU@ISUMVS.BITNET
p.s. suggestions to buy someone else's workstation are probably not appropriate
for a number of reasons I'll not bore you with.kvc@nrcvax.UUCP (Kevin Carosso) (11/16/87)
In article <8711110331.AA09746@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> GG.UUU@ISUMVS.BITNET ("John Hascall") writes: > > I am strongly considering buying a VAXstation 2000, and would greatly >appreciate any comments on the following topics: > Having had a VAXstation 2000 while I was still at Hughes (why did I leave? now it's back to using TERMINALS!) I'd like to offer some comments on our experiences. The system we had was: VAXstation 2000, 4 Mb, 44 Mb disk, 1.2 Mb floppy. We ran standalone VMS, LAVC diskless VMS, LAVC w/local page+swap VMS, and standalone (+NFS to a Sun) Ultrix V2.0. Most of the time we ran diskless VMS because we had Ultrix on the hard disk and brought the system up under either operating system by booting locally or over the net. In all configurations the system worked well. Ultrix and NFS worked as advertised, performance was excellent. We did use X windows quite a bit. We noted that X on the -2000 worked much better than X on either the Suns (which had bugs) or an Apollo (which was dreadful). Most of the time we ran VMS, so most of my comments pertain to that. We preferred the LAVC VMS with local page and swap. Management is a cinch, we had full access to almost 800 Mb of disk on the uVAX-II boot node and performance was quite acceptable on both the workstation and the boot node. > 1) Reliability We had a DEC "seed unit", which had seen quite a bit of use before we got it. I used it for about 3 months. We had no problem with the -2000 or any of it's associated components. We did have one little incident with the DEMPR that I saw repeated at another site with a DEMPR. Somehow the DEMPR got into such a state that LAVC would not come up. The boot node would claim that the satellite node was getting network timeouts. After messing around with transceivers other things, we cycled the power on the DEMPR and everything was happy. This was not a regular problem, it happened just once to me. Being nosey, I did open up the -2000. It's built very solidly, like a tank I thought, and is a little miracle of packaging. > 2) Performance (is it anywhere near the claimed 0.9x11/780 ?) Yes. Not suprisingly, the processor performance of the -2000 is identical to that of a uVAX-II and we always felt our uVAX-II lived up to the "just about a 780" rule of thumb. Please note, however, that the -2000 is much more like a small configuration uVAX-II. Our uVAX-II has 16 Mb of memory and dual Fujitsu Eagles. It's a very fast uVAX-II. You should compare the -2000 to uVAX-II configurations with RD drives. I have heard that the -2000 is actually a little faster with the RD drives than a -II, perhaps the controller is better. As far as I am concerned, this is just rumour. The ethernet device, DESVA, on the -2000 just screams. In my tests it beat out the DELUA on an 8600 and the DEQNA on the uVAX-II for raw packet blasting. We did decide that 4 Mb on the -2000, while sufficient, was not optimal. I would definitely go for 6 Mb, though the price last time I checked was way out of line (something like $1000 / Mb). Even better would be to fill the thing to 16 Mb with Clearpoint's board (though again, the price is steep). I would like to see 8 to 10 Mb available in the -2000 for the price of uVAX-II memory. LAVC performance was acceptable. Things could be a bit slow under heavy I/O situations, but I found it comparable to a uVAX-II with RD (slow) disks. As a single-user workstation, it was fine. Having your page and swap files on a local disk is useful, since you are going eat up the 4 Mb real memory. > 3) Configuration (am I forgetting something?): > > 6MB memory Good idea. > FPU I don't believe there is any option here. Like the uVAX-II, it comes with the FP chip on the system board. FP performance is just like a uVAX-II. Quite good for the price, much better than the small Sun-3 configurations. > monochrome monitor (19" or 15" [I have only seen the 19" price so far]) > > 6) Color (If you have a monochrome system: do you wish you'd got a color > system? or If you have a color system: is it worth all the extra > money--I have seen a demonstration of a 19" color monitor and it is > just amazing--but do you use color enough to justify it?) > We had the 19" monochrome. I lust after the color displays as well. One thing to note. As far as I was able to determine, the VAXstation-2000 with monochrome does not use the Dragon graphics chipset, while the color does. So graphics performace on the -2000 monochrome might be comparable to that of a VAXstation-II while a color system would be more like a /GPX. I had always thought that even the monochrome -2000 would use the GPX chips. In fact, when VWS comes up it claims the system is an "intensity" system, not "monochrome" or "color". What does that mean? (I though it meant the thing has grey-scale, like a GPX without a color monitor. But every other indication was that the "intensity" VAXstation-2000 was just like the old QVSS devices and no the GPX QDSS devices. Anyone know the real story here?). Also, I really liked the 19" display. My gut feeling is that 15" would be too small on a system like this. I like lots of big windows. I've never used the 15" display, however, so I don't really have a good reason to justify this. I would probably buy the 15" color over the 19" monochrome anyway -- though the 19" color is clearly the thing to buy if you can afford it. > 44MB half-height hard & 1.2MB half-height floppy (since this is to be > a standalone system removable media is required) > > 4) Expansion adapter (is it available as a field upgrade or does it need to > be included in the initial order? What does it consist of--the price > seems somewhat steep...) > > 5) Storage (how adequate is 44MB considering the size of VMS? or How soon > will I want to add the expansion adapter and a 71MB or 159MB disk?) > Well, as a standalone system you may be unhappy with 44 Mb. You can run VMS or Ultrix in the 44 Mb, we did for a few days, but you are going to have only a few Mb left for layered products and your own work under either operating system. Of course, you may choose not to install all of MicrVMS, we wanted all the things we were used to. It's my conviction that 70 Mb is about the minimum I could be happy with and that 150 Mb is more realistically useful. Of course that's for what I need to do at home, I don't know what you're going to use it for. If possible, always consider an LAVC. The floppy drive may be useful for installing software and carting stuff around, but I don't see it as a very useful backup device. Remember, even the 44 Mb system you are looking at is going to require almost 40 floppy disks to do one full backup. Unfortunately, a TK50 adds almost $6000 to the price of the system. Yech. Someone oughta be selling reasonably priced disk drives and a tape system for these machines. /Kevin Carosso kvc@nrcvax.uucp Network Research Co. kvc%nrcvax@trwind.trw.com kvc@engvax.scg.hac.com kvc@ymir.bitnet