[rescue] Blade 100

[velociraptor]

On 6/11/06, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:
> >2) sun says that the blade 100 requires 168pin PC133 compliant SDRAM DIMMS.
> >how does 'compliant' compare to
> >
> >> From: Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org>
> >> Subject: Re: [rescue] need blade 100 memory, hard drive
> >> ...
> >> FYI, these take standard PC100 (or is it PC133?) ECC Registered DIMMs.
>
>
> Registered == Buffered, IIRC. Compliant means the RAM matches the requirements for PC133 speed ratings.
>
> >i have no experience of pc memory (as yet - i am about to learn).
> >there are cheap non-ECC dimms, but so far, the ones which meet the sun
> >description are not cheap.
>
> Yep, 256 Meg pieces seem to be a practical size (cost vs. usefuleness) - 512 Meg pieces are cost-prohibitive in most cases. Again, keep an eye out for a slower system with lot's of RAM on eBay and see if you can get it cheap - you will find in many older Sun systems the "Sum is worth less than the parts" - many times complete system selll for less that the value of the RAM, CPU, or HD alone...

I can attest to the fact that the ECC memory commonly available for
Compaq servers will *not* work in the Blade 100.  (BTDT)

> >3) i am puzzled by the following:
> >>From: velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com>
> >>
> >>I'd also advise getting away from the on-board IDE if you can.  1) it
> >>can't handle bigger than 120GB (addressing issue), and 2) it's slower
> >>than frozen molasses.  Anything less than 256MB and you'll be swearing
> >>at it...
> >>
> >>At the very least, a second faster IDE and pointing swap to the
> >>original is a must in my mind.
> >
> >is there any reason to keep the stock 15gig drive, and not to replace it with
> >something substantially larger and faster?  or move it to the slave position
> >after installing a better master drive?
>
> The controller chip is slow, no software can really make it better than it is in Solaris 10 > (I think there was a patch early on because the software was broken too). Adding a
> faster drive will simply allow you to "max out" theslow performance of the bad
> controller implementation.

Thinks pre-DMA speeds.  My understanding is that the DMA
implementation on the Blade 100's is severely broken.  In fact, if
running Linux on it, you have to completely disable DMA mode, or you
*will* get a corrupted boot file system.  (Oddly, it only seems to
affect the boot partition, not data partitions.

>Cheap SCSI cards are available, and with a reasonable SCSI HD, your
performance >will improve vastly. (I recently bought an Ultra 30 on
eBay for $30 simply because it >had a 300 MHz CPU, 2x UPA
framebuffers, and a Sun SCSI card installed. I am going >to strip it
down for the parts and put to gether a minimal system from my left
overs.) >120 Gig HDs are easily found for $30-60 after rebate on
almost any weekend - they are >fine, but don't rely on them for a
"massive" speed increase - it will be a nice little >"bump" up in
performance...

I think I'll just have Lionel be my eBay proxy buyer, he seems to
always find the good stuff. :-)

=Nadine=