From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jan 24 17:44:11 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id RAA08692 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 24 Jan 1997 17:44:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from horst.bfd.com (horst.bfd.com [204.160.242.10]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id RAA08687 for ; Fri, 24 Jan 1997 17:44:09 -0800 (PST) Received: from harlie (bastion.bfd.com [204.160.242.14]) by horst.bfd.com (8.8.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id RAA08504 for ; Fri, 24 Jan 1997 17:44:06 -0800 (PST) Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 17:44:06 -0800 (PST) From: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" X-Sender: ejs@harlie To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: SCSI Controller suggestions? Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I'm putting together a web server for an interesting project, where most of the documents will be dynamically generated from a database. The storage requirements aren't much, but I'm insisting on SCSI anyway. I'm not sure whether I'm going with a 2GB, or dual 1GB drives. Does anyone make drives with solid performance in the 1GB range anymore? If I go with 1 2G, It'll probably be IBM UltraStar ES or XP. The next question is, what SCSI controller? Since the machine is on a T1 and most of the documents will have graphics (not DB generated, only the url will be pulled from a DB) a faster bus might reduce the latency, but won't do much for actual throughput. I'm currently deciding between the following: NEC810 based NEC825 based NEC875 based AHA2940 AHA2940U AHA2940UW The server will be running 2.1.6 at least for the next several months, so you know what drivers will be used. I'm favoring the AHA2940 family, mostly because we already have two FreeBSD machines running them(Identified as rev 0, not sure what that makes them), and I'd like to keep them all the same. I've heard that unless bus saturation is important, the U and UW are actually slower than the base model, something to due with how many outstanding commands can be queued, if I remember correctly. I'm currently favoring the AHA2940 for this reason. Also, the cpu this will be on is a P6/150 w/64M Ram. Why? Not because it needs it, but because at $520 for cpu and motherboard, it's cheaper than a P5/166 and motherboard). Anyway, does anyone with more SCSI experience care to comment on the direction I'm going?