would a diskfull SLC + a diskless one work?

[roberto at bondi.phyast.pitt.edu]

I have been asked to put together a system asap, and I would appreciate
your advice.  The configuration we are considering would be:

1) SS1+, 8 Mb, monochrome, diskless
2) external SCSI drive (600 Mb or so) 
3) 150 Mb 1/4" tape
4) X-terminal
5) Laser Printer (*)
6) a second hard disk, either a 300 Mb or 600 Mb unit (*)

   (*) this is optional, we may not have the money for it.

We will probably get items (2) and (3) from third party suppliers, which
brings the first question: would you care to recomend a supplier of `plug
and play', idiot-proof compatible boxes (tape and 600 Mb hard disks
combos) ?  It's extremely important that the shoebox works with the Sparc
from the start, the intended users are not very hardware oriented.  Any
horror stories and mention of places to stay away from would be welcome
too.

Also, is there something wrong with the following alternative: replace
items (1) and (4) above by 2 Sparcstations 4/20, with a 600 Mb HD + tape
combo in one of them, the second one running diskless. We have been
running a SS1 diskless served by a diskfull SS1, in a similar
configuration, and the performance seems acceptable.  Will we see similar
performance with two SLC's ?  I'm aware of the slower floating point chip
in the SLC, but it seems as fast as the one in a 4/260 (1.2 Mflops, or so
they claim), and we can live with that.

Lastly, has anyone hooked a LaserJet III to a Sun? I'm thinking about a LJ
III with an additional 2 Mbytes of memory and a PostScript cartridge.
This configuration seems cheaper than a comparable LaserWriter NTX.  The
printer is to be used mostly for TeX output and PostScript graphics. 

Thanks in advance. I will post a summary of replies if there is interest.

Roberto Gomez			    | Arpa:   roberto at bondi.phyast.pitt.edu
Department of Physics and Astronomy | Bitnet: gomez at pittvms
University of Pittsburgh	    | UUCP:   ...!psuvax1!pitt!cisunx!gomez
Pittsburgh PA 15260 (USA)           | Phone:  (412) 624-9089