[rescue] Re: sun e450 salvage -questions

[Lionel Peterson]

> From: Charles Redmond <charlie250y at yahoo.com.au>
> Date: 2004/05/06 Thu AM 11:19:28 GMT
> To: rescue at sunhelp.org
> Subject: [rescue] Re: sun e450 salvage -questions
> 
> Thanks to Janet for her answers.
> I removed some ram from an old sparc 10 for testing
> purposes and fired the best up.
> 
> I found one of the CPU's didn't match so I removed
> that and also had one faulty power supply.

Odd that it would have two kinds of CPUs...
 
> So I now have a 3 x 400 Mhz E450 up. Now to buy a
> reasonable quantity of ram for the beast. (-:

IIRC, the E450 will interleve nicely if your RAM is all matched - sets of 4 are required, but if you have a bank of 8 or all 16 DIMM sockets filled with identical RAM, it will interleve across them...
 
> So over the next month a few trips to ebay are in
> order to buy in order:
> 1 GB ram
> some spud brackets and disks
> 2 more power supplies.

Did you say it has more than the standard 4 drive SCSI backplane? Does it have one or two additional 8 drive backplanes, and required PCI SCSI cards to drive them? If so, you got a wicked good deal ;^)

I don't think additional PS are needed, but I just got two (to fill out my E450 for $60/ea, including S/H - $45 before S/H). 

> I'd also like to add casters back to the base of the
> unit since having it flat on the floor is very awkward
> to open the disk bay door. Dunno if I could buy them
> at a hardware store (???)

Why not get some scrap lumber and make a pedestal out of it? Two 24" runs of 2x4" on their wide side under the E450 would provide nice airflow and accessibility...

Great rescue!