From owner-freebsd-hardware Wed Oct 8 18:45:24 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id SAA29533 for hardware-outgoing; Wed, 8 Oct 1997 18:45:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hardware) Received: from misery.sdf.com (misery.sdf.com [204.244.210.193]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id SAA29528 for ; Wed, 8 Oct 1997 18:45:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tom@sdf.com) Received: from tom by misery.sdf.com with smtp (Exim 1.71 #1) id 0xJ7eL-0007Fb-00; Wed, 8 Oct 1997 18:44:25 -0700 Date: Wed, 8 Oct 1997 18:44:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom To: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Assembling new machine In-Reply-To: <199710090048.RAA11124@kithrup.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Wed, 8 Oct 1997, Sean Eric Fagan wrote: > For the disks... I'm not sure what to do. I don't need a *lot* of space -- > so I'm thinking 2GBytes or so. I got a recommendation for the Seagate > ST32171N, which I haven't found but did see a ST32272N which appears to > be an ultra version of that. And, of course, several people have > recommended an IBM drive whose name and part number I forget :). The Seagate Barracuda 4XL series is nice. Available in 2 and 4gb versions. It is quite expensive though. I've got 19 of these in service right now. No DOAs, and no failures at all. A lot or people have been recommended various SCSI drives, howerver, lately some details of performance issues and bugs regarding the number of simultaneous commands they can handle. See archives (maybe, this discussion was recent and I don't know how often the archive is updated). > Someone else recommended the Quantum Atlas II series; Fry's (local computer > supermarket) has a Quantum Atlas II 2.2Gbyte fast wide drive for $265. But > the low price concerns me. It is cheap, because it no longer made. Quantum high-end drive is now the Atlass III. > I'd also consider, I think, getting an EIDE drive (1-2GBytes) for root and > usr, and using the SCSI drive for /var/users and /usr/src. (I will be > using, incidently, a 1GByte Fujitsu drive for my news disk -- this > particular drive is currently in use in kithrup for just that purpose.) Well, I wouldn't do that. root is where you want the reliability. If you lose that, you can't boot. > My requirements for disk drives are: affordable, reliable, reasonably fast > and large. > > I also don't know whether the SCSI drives should be internal or external. > External adds a fair bit of cost, but then I don't need to worry as much > about power-supply problems. But, then, I won't be having a huge amount of > drives -- I don't expect to have many more than what I've stated so far, not > for a while at least. If you need to go external, buy internal drives and put them into your own case. Power is not much of an issue. You do use 300W power supplies don't you, not those toy power supplies that put into AST and Packard Bells? > So... comments? Recommendations? Warnings? :) Tom