[rescue] SGI Indigo 2

[Nathan Raymond]

So I picked up a couple of Indigo 2's at the MIT Swap Fest yesterday for
$5 a piece (it was weird, I only saw them on a last walk-around around
1pm, and I'd done a few walk-arounds since I'd set my table up at 7am).
I haven't booted them up yet, so who knows if they even work - the guys
selling them claim they were donated to their school but they didn't know
what to do with them.  After buying them I later opened them up and found
the purple Impact 10000 didn't have any memory in it, and the teal had
four sticks.  Someone had also swapped the 195Mhz R10k into the teal, and
a 100Mhz R4000 was *loose* in the purple box.  Neither had a CD-ROM sled,
and one was missing a 3.5" sled.  I have some questions:

Can I use 7200RPM 3.5" half-height SCA drives with adapters on a 3.5"
sled, or are there space/thermal issues with this config?

What's a good price to pay for GIO 100Base-T ethernet, and what's the
performance like relative to the EISA 100Base-T?  (A lot better I would
expect.)

Can it make use of 72-pin 128MB ECC RAM sticks, or is it really limited
to 32MB (teal) and 64MB (purple)?

How important is it to get gold-contact RAM?  I researched the gold on tin
interactions that do cause a kind of molecular oxidation, but it seems
that the oxidation rate is very slow and doesn't have any real-world
impact.  Anyone have any experiences or info to counter this?

Thanks in advance for any help...

--
Nathan Raymond