[rescue] Happy New Year! RIP, Sun/Solaris...

[Ray Arachelian]

On 01/06/2011 04:22 AM, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
>
> have dueling
> sales on external USB drives, it's not worth buying a bare drive.

I find those usually come without fans, and cheap crappy plastic cases
that kill the drive.  Those are meant as disposable after a year or so,
and not meant for 24/7 duty.

You're better off with bare drives and proper metal cases with fans in
them.  (These usually go for $30-50 on newegg.)

As usual, you get what you pay for.  Now, if you're only buying those
USB drives to rip the drives out and install them internally, that's
fine, but keep in mind, those USB drives are usually the low end ones,
i.e. 5400rpm.  So if you're ok with that, it's all good.   A couple of
years ago, a few of those were really two drives glued together as a
RAID 0.  Avoid those like the plague unless you like losing data (or
just want two drives to use internally.)

Generally, I buy external drives for use as backup, so I'd like to have
the drive live as long as possible - and 5400rpm is perfectly fine.  For
internals, I go for 7200rpms (except for the drives in the NAS box, in
which case, since the network becomes the bottleneck, it doesn't much
matter.)

But yeah, if shipping is an issue, it's going to be difficult no matter
how you go.


Speaking of the death of OpenSolaris, there  is a new project based on
OpenSolaris code called OpenInidiana, it's worth looking at.  While they
don't yet have SPARC bits, with enough time and encouragement from end
users, they will.  They recently had a 0.148 release that's got patches
beyond the final dev release of OpenSolaris (which is now a dead
parrot.)  OI is based on Illumnos which tracks whatever Oracle will
release.  OI fixes some nasty ZFS patches as well other stuff that are
still in the last available OpenSolaris svn_134 dev release, so it's
highly recommended to move on to OI if you're running OpenSolaris right now.

Oracle claims it will release sources for Solaris 11 Express, but hasn't
done so yet.  Once it does so, they'll be merged to Illumnos and OI. 
(Illumnos acts as a source repository for OI and other OpenSolaris spin
offs.) There was a whole mess of political unhappiness back a few months
ago regarding Oracle and OpenSolaris, but the bottom is, the community
(now filled with ex-Sun employees)  won't let OpenSolaris die, and will
provide security fixes/patches, etc.  So it's worth supporting and
looking at OI if you prefer Solaris over *BSD/Linux and are only
considering moving because of a lack of patches.

The new Solaris proper license says you have to buy support (priced per
CPU core) after 90 days unless you're using it for testing.  So if
you've downloaded a previous release to that license change (from
sun.com that is), you can still continue use it under the old license
but without patches on SPARC, until such time as OpenIndiana is fully
functional on SPARC.  Just my $0.02.