den <dchang.04@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm looking to buy some old hardware. Specifically a Ultra 5.

any special reason for an U5? There are numerous disadvantages
of that model like slow IDE, no Creator3D graphics etc.

> My question is is 512 MB memory the max on this workstation?

1GB is max with the correct modules. Some modules are too
high to fit in the case.

> What about hard drive capacity?

128GB max IIRC, because of some OBP limitations.
IDE on the U5 and 10 is only UDMA33, so it's pretty slow.
They don't make good fileservers with IDE disks.

> To generalize, is it safe to assume that many of PC world components
> would equally work with the Ultra 5? PCI ... etc.

in general: yes. The OS you want to run will probably the limiting
factor. There aren't that many generic PCI cards supported by
Solaris/SPARC. If you run Linux or BSD you can normally use
any card already supported in the PC world.

gruss,
Dennis

--
Don't suffer from insanity...
Enjoy every minute of it.