Anyone have a DECstation 5810 or 5820?

[Ian! D. Allen [CGL]]

Anyone have stories about the 5810 or 5820 they want to share?
We are thinking of replacing our VAX8600/4.3bsd with one.
We were originally thinking of getting two DS5400's, but the low disk
bandwidth of the 5400's would probably upset us.

On our 8600 we have 6 RA81's and 2 RA82's on three UDA50 controllers.
Each controller is in its own Unibus adapter.  I'm trying to decide
whether to keep the disks or upgrade to RA70's or RA90's or maybe get
two RA90's and use the two RA82's or...  And there's the whole thing
about do I really want a few big and fast disks (RA90) or a bunch of
small but slower ones with more seek overlap (RA70), and should I put
all four disks on the one KDB50 controller or should I really buy
another, or several others...  If anyone has a pointer to some DEC
person who can discuss such questions intelligently, let me know.
This kind of technical detail is beyond our local sales rep's expertise.

And can anyone explain DEC's pricing on this thing?  As I understand it,
a single-cpu VAX6000 machine with the same memory and disk costs the same
as or more than the DS5810, but the 5810 runs at four times the cpu speed.
-- 
-IAN! (Ian! D. Allen) idallen at watcgl.uwaterloo.ca idallen at watcgl.waterloo.edu
 129.97.128.64    Computer Graphics Lab/University of Waterloo/Ontario/Canada