We have Sunfire Ultra 40's. I recommended those based on other people
buying Sunfire Ultra 20's, V40z, etc in our place. All Ultra 40's run
fine after 4 years and its now closer to 5 years. All of them blew
their NVidia graphic cards. The other guys have plans to dump them as
they follow 5 year refresh cycle (they might already have replaced
them). We purchased new NVidia graphics and plan to go another 2-3
years. No other problems reported. Original keyboards, mouse, LCD
screens. Whisper quiet. No dust inside that I see when I opened up for
graphics replacement.

Problem is now, you can't access Sun's website to download BIOS
upgrades, which you would need to put new 4GB RAM into them instead of
current 1GB or 2 GB sticks.

HTH

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Scott Stanley
<amorphous.yet.not@gmail.com> wrote:
quoted text
> I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of
> you have much experience with Sun's amd gear?
>
> When using the "I'm only referring to Sparc" disclaimer, what's being
> implied here (because I know nobody's saying that hardware fails
> because of the CPU type, or am I wrong on that)?
>
> Is it that Sparc boxes are for mission critical apps, and so "let's
> use only the best hardware"?
>
> Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home
> server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with
> Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but
> not real world stuff).
>
> -Scott
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 12:08 AM, SJP Lists <sjp.lists@flashbsd.net> wrote:
>> On 9 November 2010 04:44, Christopher Dukes <pakrat@pr.neotoma.org> wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote:
>>>> "If your Sun fails" <-- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility
>>>> of 0 in my experience.
>>>>
>>>> If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of
>>>> this hardware is as stable as a Sun.
>>>
>>> Not quite my experience.
>>> In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of
>>> Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s).
>>> Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s.
>>> And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash
>>> and burn while building OpenBSD from source.
>>> A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _
>>> orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives.
>>> On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and
>>> drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful
>>> DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them.
>>>
>>> I thought the Micro Channel based RS/6Ks (Before the horrid SMP ones
>>> designed by Group Bull) were a bit more bullet proof, with the only dead
>>> hardware I'd experience being.
>>> 1) Rats pissing on the system boards, because the customer refused to
>>> keep the covers on their systems in manufacturing.
>>> 2) A ladybird beetle invasion.
>>> The RT PC was pretty reliable too.  I had one manufactured in 1987 that
>>> was still trundling along in 2006 when I gave it away.
>>
>> Maybe I got lucky, but all my Sun gear works nicely.  10x U10's/U5's,
>> a Blade 150, 2x Ultra 60's, 1x Ultra 80 and a Sun Fire V250.
>>
>> This includes a U10 with an exploded yellow diode and the Sun Fire
>> V250 having been dropped (presumably in transit) causing the LOM card
>> to rip off the plastic from one end of it's mate connector in the
>> motherboard.  Not knowing that, attempting to power it up caused smoke
>> and a really bad feeling.  I had to do some MacGyver'ing to fix that,
>> but it's working fine.
>>
>>
>> Shane