Sun Blade 100

The Sun Blade 100 is a very nice little entry-point workstation. It is a real SPARC machine, but in a PC environment. This makes it an affordabale machine, costing no more than a x86 PC. And since much of the parts consists of standard PC stock, one can use 3rd party parts.

In Norway the cheapest version (128 MB RAM) went for around NOK 17.000,- (spring 2002). I have then added RAM so it now consists of a total of 768 MB. This is standard PC133 SDRAM, which is bought cheaper elsewhere (beware that it has to be ECC, though!). Additionally I have put an extra IDE drive into the case - which has room for two drives internally. The default included drive is probably the weakest point of the machine, since it is a very slow Seagate. Adding a fast number two, and using that one for compilations, swap etc. is a good investment. Autumn 2003 I swapped the original 15GB disk for a new Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB disk which is much faster - and also less noisy.

Another irritating missing link, is the descision to not connect the soundcard and CD-player internally. This means one has to either connect the player with the soundcard using an external cable, or play music from a CD as data using software (and thereby wasting CPU-cycles).

Otherwise though, this is a nice machine indeed.

Picture of the Sun Blade 100 standing on its side

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