[geeks] Suprise - ext. USB HD "Just Worked" under Solaris 10

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com>
>Date: 2006/11/04 Sat PM 01:42:07 CST
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Suprise - ext. USB HD "Just Worked" under Solaris  10

>On 11/4/06, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:
>> I was suprised that an external USB HD "just worked" on my Sun Blade 1000 (future) desktop. On a whim I just plugged an 80 Gig USB 2.0 Hard Drive in to my system that was running Solaris 10 06/06, and without even a pop-up dialog mounted the drive as /dev/rmdisk (IIRC)...
>>
>> This may be old-hat to many, but I was caught by suprise by this.
>>
>> When I say it worked, I was able to browse the filesystem, copy files onto the local drives off the ext. drive, etc...
>>
>> Anyway, I wasn't expecting it to just work - but it did.
>
>IEEE 1394/Firewire "just works", too, assuming the filesystem type is
>known to Solaris.
>
>I have been patching a bunch of workstations at $ork, and the SB1000
>is a hellofalot faster than 2x400Mhz cpu U80s, I must say.  SB1K's
>take about 2hrs or so; U80's about 4.

Inquiring minds want to know - "what" takes 2 hours on a SB1000 and 4 hours on a U80?

My SB1000 has dual 900 MHz Cu processors, 2 Gig RAM, and dual FC-AL HDs (each 36 Gigs). It is a mighty "little" box, and I'm not quite sure why I left it sitting idle for so long...

I think part of the speed difference is the FC-AL HD interfaces, compared to the SCSI in an Ultra 80, and the 8 Meg CPU cache in (most) CPUs for this box also probably has a serious impact. The U80 can, at best, accomodate 4x 450 MHz CPUs w/4 Meg cache each. Also, let's not forget UltraSPARC III vs UltraSPARC II differences...

Lesser SB1000s are available on eBay for $199 (w/750 MHz CPU, 1 Gig RAM, and one HD (whose size escapes me)), but a system like mine runs about $500 +/-. This week I'm going to upgrade the framebuffer to my $110 XVR-600 and see if that has a big impact on (perceived) performance.

Lionel