We just installed two new giant disks into my server at work. Working with the Sun Enterprise 250 reminds me a bit of what it used to feel like to use a computer. When I was a kid, using a computer was a big deal. You worried that you would do the wrong thing and cause some terrible problem (which I would visualize as smoke pouring from the CPU, a floor-to-ceiling cabinet covered with winking lights, next to a similiar cabinet with spinning tape reels with the tape spilling out onto the floor). I'm comfortable logging into the E250 with a shell, but sitting at the console and using openwin is a lot more threatening. The E250 is an imposing gray box, about three-times as large as a regular workstation. Mine has an additional enclosure on top with three older drives installed there.
It's even more threatening to open it up, put in new hardware, and then watch it do a 'reconfiguration boot', where you have to interrupt the boot sequence at just the right time and then type 'boot -r' at the prompt. The Sun keyboard has a bunch of extra keys along the left and puts the delete key in the wrong place, which contributes to its mystique.
Anyway, the first drive is formatting now. It claims it will take 332 minutes to format a 36GB drive. I'll check on it in the morning.