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Experiences with the Sun Blade 100?
SomewhereElse asks: "
It's been a few months since Sun introduced the Sun Blade 100 and I wanted to ask Slashdot readers who have had the oppotrunity to review/play with the box what they thought of it. How upgradeable is it? How fast does it feel? And were there any problems with the hardware?"
I just happened to be in the US on business the day the Blade hit the market. Overnight shipping to a friend's house, threw it into my bag and came back to Europe with it. Much jealousy ensued on this side of the pond. For about US$1500, I have a native sparc machine with 1Gb RAM and a 60Mb drive, and interactive performance rivals most of the bigger sun hardware at work (but as a server it is nowhere in the same league).
The blade has now become my main home machine. Its basically a PC with a sparc in place of a pentium. You buy it to out-geek your geek friends, not to win childish MHz pissing games. It can be overclocked, and there are other hardware tweaks. The RAM is a cheap PC commodity, IDE drives easily upgradable (buy a matched pair, DiskSuite comes installed, and throw out that noisy seagate), the 10/100 ethernet provides excellent thru-put. You can use any USB keyboard or mouse you want, but mouse wheel support is still lacking. Standard VGA multisync monitors work with it.
It runs all the hi-paying software that I and my conslutant friends use in our professional lives. Oracle 8i, SAP financials and tons of other stuff. Having a true sparc at home is great for brushing up over a weekend before heading out to a new client site, can't do that on an x86 box.
There are some 'bad' things, but nothing to keep you from buying a blade. Support in OpenBoot for USB hubs is lacking, so you can't have a KVM switch or hub when booting (but you can switch once booted). There is a built in smartcard reader, but absolutely no software for it yet, it reads SunRay cards, but doesn't do anything. There is almost no USB driver support for all the cool USB peripherals out there (most USB crud requires special micro~1.oft or mac drivers to work, and solaris is ignored). There is no Firewire support, except for one hacked driver for their overpriced web-cam. There is only one serial port (the second one is on the mobo, just add your own cable). The built in sound card has no internal audio connector, so you can't play audio CDs in the internal drive, and you probably couldn't hear the music over the drive anyways, the CD-ROM is the loudest peripheral I've ever had, not counting disintegrating hard drives. The real time clock is so fucked, even ntpd can't correct it.
With any luck, sun is working hard at fixing all the little problems. Most complaints come from lack of working features/drivers in Solaris, which means they'll get fixed in time. The hardware itself is pretty solid.
Go read news:comp.sys.sun.hardware, and peruse google groups, and find the B100 FAQ and you'll have a much better idea of what to expect.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
So far so good. Yes, the IDE speed sucks, BUT, it is the drive and not the controller. Many people are putting in nice fast IBM drives and getting much better performance. The Seagate drive they ship is slow.
:)
Memory upgrades are easy. They ship Crucial memory in the unit so you know you're safe adding more. Nice to add 512MB of RAM to a Sun for $100.
As someone else said, it is very quiet. Nice compared to my loud PC sitting beside it.