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Irix is rock solid when well managed
by bloodflowers on Thu 3rd Oct 2002 12:52 UTC

Like most commercial unixes, Irix is a rock solid OS when you manage it properly. I'll deliberately leave Sun out of that endorsement due to their extremely unreliable hardware of late. Just make sure you use the 6.5.x series, since the 6.2s were terrible.

There are now a lot of second hand SGI machines floating around on ebay/etc - they make excellent general purpose desk machines, and the big iron is affordable and ideal as a fileserver. $900 bought me a 12x CPU challenge L - which now sits in the garage obediently serving files, and running seti ;-) $900 spent on a PC will not get you anything like the memory bandwidth and SMP power an old server can (and the server will probably last longer too..) Shop around and it's pretty easy to find ones with multiple fiber interfaces :-)