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Some of the newer workstation-class Sun boxes are IDE. The Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 I know are, right off the top of my head.
So, excuse me whilst I Google for basic things like "can the case hold more than one drive?",
The Ultra 5 can hold 4 drives, typically floppy, HDD, CD and space for a 3.5" drive above the floppy. Of course, you could swap out the CD or floppy for an HDD. The Ultra 10 can hold 3 HDDs plus CD and floppy without modifications. Again you could sacrifice the floppy and/or CD for more HDD capacity. Also, not all Ultra 5s and Ultra 10s have a CD in its slot, so check the specification carefully.
The Ultra 30 and Ultra 60 tower units use a kind of HDD sled design that requires a bracket (known as a SPUD bracket) to be fitted to the drive. The SPUD bracket is great for servicing - you just power down the box, whip out one drive and pop in the replacement - but can be difficult to obtain (Ebay is good) unless you want to buy your drives from Sun.
You can pick up a 400MHz or 440MHz Ultra 5 off Ebay for around £150. Less for a slower speed (eg 270MHz) CPU. Make sure you buy from someone offering a guarantee as intermittent hardware problems, although rare, do crop up from time to time especially on 400/440MHz CPUs.
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"will I have any trouble compiling any of the music server softwares for it?"
Most people run the Solaris OS on their Sun boxes, which is Sun's version of SysV (AT&T) Unix. Solaris is particular well known for its rock solid, high power and very scalable kernel, and rock solid NFS and TCP/IP implementations.
There is also SparcLinux, which is particularly popular on older tin as each new version of Solaris assumes slightly more powerful hardware than the last (a huge oversimplication, but we don't have enough space here for the details).
Any popular Linux program (think Perl, Sendmail, Apache web server and the like) will have been written to also compile on Solaris. Fringe stuff with only a few developers can be made to compile on Solaris by a proficient developer (assuming that developer has access to the source). Only particularly lazy code will fail to compile on SparcLinux if it compiles on x86.
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these two are just too big for what I want
As Bitt said, the Ultra 5 case dimensions are roughly those of a standard PC under-monitor case. The Ultra 10 case dimensions are roughly those of a standard PC half-height tower case.
Edited by mdavey (09/12/2004 06:49)
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