Re: Power supply efficiency on older model Sun equipment

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 11:18:56PM -0300, D G Teed wrote:
> rising cost of energy, and the appearance of new
> processors and standards like 80 Plus, I'm starting
> to look at my options.  Is it better to save these
> old Sun machines from land-fill, or is it better
> to prevent coal from being burned to keep them in operation?

Better to prevent coal from being burned, IMHO.  Even better to keep
the old Suns around as mantle pieces or weights for pressing leaves
than chucking them out.  I'll be using mine for furniture before
they go to any landfill.

> 80plus power supply.  I'd probably keep one Sun
> box for test drives of new Sun Solaris and that sort of
> thing, but not keep any Sun machine on 24 hours a day.

Hmmm.  Will "new" Sun Solaris run on any of those old machines.
I think Solaris 2.6 was the last I could run on my IPCs, and
Solaris 2.8 was the last for my Classics.  I run NetBSD on all
of my Sun equipment in use today.

> The Intel or AMD solution is cheap, adequate for home
> server loads, and light on the power bill,

I moved my two servers from SparcStation5s to Intel PentIIIs two
years ago.  The electric bill did go down noticably.  In addition,
one great advantage I found was to be able to easily cover the two
servers with one UPS.  With the Suns I had to have one for each
machine.  Also, I enjoyed being able to increase memory size about
10 times for practically nothing money wise.

> as well as not making the house too hot.

For sure!

-- 
henry n.