[Info-vax] Alpha CPU revision & serial number, blank?

[Steven Schweda]

> SCSI DVD, nice.

   Faster (DMA) than ATAPI (PIO) on an Alpha.

>   I don't hear about them or see them very often.

   From the dark gray color, I assume that the local junk
store pulled these from some Sun system(s).  I never saw
anything else which looked related, so my guess would be that
they saw non-Intel hardware, declared it to be scrap, and
then pulled the only parts which might appeal to their usual
(Windows-using) customers.  After the first batch, I never
saw any more like them.  Whenever I think about all the
desirable (to me) hardware which gets sent straight to the
shredder because it doesn't run Windows, I get depressed.

> Did you ever look into SAS/SATA?  [...]

   Not seriously.  For what I do, I don't really need
hundreds of GB of disk space, and, other than a dead Mac G5,
I don't have any other hardware which uses SATA, and nothing
with SAS.  Someday, perhaps.  (Like when I get that Dell
Precision workstation, load GNU/Linux on it, and quit trying
to do anything useful on VMS.)

> You wouldn't be able to boot off it either [...]

   So, not much of an attraction.

> [...] SDLT-320 drives [...]

   I complain about the cost of DLT IV tapes (often more than
$1 each), and I assume that newer, fancier tapes cost even
more.  Plain DLT is a better match to the whole junk
collection (and budget) than something more modern.