Sun Blade 100

Background
Last summer I purchased a Sun Blade 100 on eBay for my programming needs.  After a full year of use, I now feel that I am in a very good position to discuss its performance and usefulness.

Intial Thoughts
My initial reason for buying the Sun Blade 100 was its very good price.  I am a college student and spending in excess of 10k dollars on a Sun with an UltraSPARC III processor was out of the question.  So, for me, the Sun Blade 100 made the most sense.  I was interested in a machine that was stable, reliable, was moderately fast, had 64-bit capabilities, and would allow for future expansion if needed.  As it turns out, I ended up upgrading sooner rather than later.  The Sun that I bought on eBay was, in fact, perfectly new.  Due to the changing economic times a company that was going to hire someone to use it for development had decided to have a hiring freeze and thus, the project that the computer was intended for was put on "indefinite hold."  Their bad luck was my gain.  I ended up getting a Sun Blade 100 with a Sun 19" Flat monitor, and a load of software, valued at, reasonably speaking 8k dollars, for just $1650.  I was happy to say the least.

Setup
Setting up the computer was a breeze.  Sun Microsystems has done an excellent job of making it easier for people to use their products.  I had worked as a UNIX SysAdmin for a couple years already and have been using linux for over 8 years, thus, I had no difficulty getting a fresh install of Solaris 8 up and running.  To those who are Microsoft windows users, using CDE will certainly feel like a step back to the Win 3.11 era.  Windows 95 pretty much blows away CDE in terms of interface easy of use, flexibility, conformability, and speed.  So, at the time, I was forced to use the not yet fully supported KDE or Gnome for Solaris 8 which comes on their additional software CD.  I enjoyed using both windowing systems, but I must say, I was truly thrilled when Sun decided to start fully supporting a more advanced system than CDE with the introduction of Solaris 9.  Personally, I have to admit, I am a bit more fond of KDE, but, for reasons relating to government regulations for accessiblity, Gnome has now been chosen as the new Solaris windowing system.

With my system I also received a new Sun PCi card.  The setup for the Sun PCi card also went very well.  I chose to install Windows 2000.  The Sun PCi card uses a virtual drive, represented as a single file, on the host's hard drive.  In addition, the Sun PCi can be configured to use an IDE hard drive attached directly, which, I am certain, would greatly increase the drive performance.  As I was not concerned with having an incredible amount of performance, I didn't opt to use this option.

Performance
The system is not incredibly fast, a 256-KB cache doesn't really help the situation much.  I performed the upgrades discussed in the section below.  They certainly helped the performance issues.  The performance is nowhere near that of any x86 computer, except for perhaps one from 5 years ago.  However, that is not why someone buys a Sun.  For one thing, there is the opportunity to use Solaris, a truly wonderful OS.  The hardware is truly delightful to use.  All the software just seems to fit together correctly and the hardware is perfectly matched.  It a a beautiful thing when one company makes all the software and hardware for a system.  Everything just seems right.

Upgrades
On my system I have performed a number of upgrades.  Firstly, I upgraded the main system memory to 1.7 GB from the stock 128 MB.  I, honestly, can not believe that Sun has the audacity to sell a computer with so little RAM.  A Sun, reasonably, needs at least 512 MB of RAM for the uses most people will put it to.  Yes, I know someone reading will think this amount of RAM is an excess.  In fact, it is not.  Recently when running some of the minimum spanning tree algorithms I was running on trees that were in excess of 200 MBytes.  While I was at it, I also upgraded the Sun PCi card to 384 MB or RAM.  As everyone knows, 128 MB just really doesn't cut it for running Windows 2000.  384 MB was an easy addition of a 256 MB DIMM to the 128 MB that came with it.  I really can not tell you the performance increase of these upgrades because I never tried to run my system without them.

The next upgrade I performed was to get a new hard drive in the system.  The hard drive that Sun provides is mediocre at best.  I was very disappointed with the performance.  So, after a few months of suffering with the slow boot times, slow disk access, and noisy from the drive, I purchased a Western-Digital 80GB 8MB Cache hard drive from NewEgg.com.  To perform the upgrade, I added the hard drive to the system, then booted up with the old hard drive, made a new file system on the new drive.  I then ufsdump and ufsrestore to dump the old drive over to the new one.  I then shutdown the system, disconnected the old drive, and reconnected the new one in its place.  I then booted the system and was happy to see the new drive bring the OS right up.

Finding that the video performance was lacking, I upgraded the video card to a Sun Expert3D-Lite.  This is an incredibly nice OpenGL accelerator for the 3D work I do.  If you do any 3D graphics, I would highly recommend you purchase one.  It is an excellent accelerator.

I also installed a Sun Swift PCI card.  This provides an ultra-SCSI port internally and externally and a 10/100 ethernet port.  As the Blade 100 already has one built in, this increase the number of ethernet ports available to two on the system.  However, I was most interested in using the external SCSI port for my HP DDS-4 tape backup drive.  The port functions quite well and runs my backups everynight thanks to Amanda (The Automated Maryland Tape Archiver).

Conclusion