From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Nov 5 00:51:17 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id AAA25296 for chat-outgoing; Wed, 5 Nov 1997 00:51:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat) Received: from sax.sax.de (sax.sax.de [193.175.26.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id AAA25286 for ; Wed, 5 Nov 1997 00:51:08 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from j@uriah.heep.sax.de) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id JAA05103; Wed, 5 Nov 1997 09:50:42 +0100 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.8.7/8.8.5) id JAA15987; Wed, 5 Nov 1997 09:27:47 +0100 (MET) Message-ID: <19971105092746.CJ29364@uriah.heep.sax.de> Date: Wed, 5 Nov 1997 09:27:46 +0100 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: nellie@home.com Subject: Re: hardware References: X-Mailer: Mutt 0.60_p2-3,5,8-9 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: ; from nellie@home.com on Nov 3, 1997 22:15:26 -0500 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk As nellie@home.com wrote: > I am wondering if the following items are compatabile with FreeBSD before I > buy them: > > a US CD ROM drive What is this? Please, describe technical features, not marketing names. > a Toshiba CD drive If it's SCSI, no question. If it's ATAPI, it will work very likely, too. > Matrox Millenium II with 4mb WRAM I think the shipped X server from XFree86 is not very excellent yet for this card, you might want to try one of their more recent beta versions, or use the commercial server from Xig. > an LS120 floppy/backup drive AFAIK, not compatible. (I don't use IDE stuff myself.) > Ultra DMA HD's There's code in -current to cope with the so-called ``Ultra DMA'', but i don't think you'll benefit much from it in the released versions. > SB 64 AWE value edition Sound Card No idea on this. Leave out the IDE cra^H^H^Hstuff, and go for SCSI instead. Start with a cheap NCR (actually, Symbios Logic) 53c810 controller, and buy the drives as you need them. You won't regret it in the end. The IBM DCAS 4 GB drives seem to be *the* current tip for SCSI hard disks. Cheap, cool, silent, fast. I think you almost can't buy any SCSI CD-ROM drive that wouldn't work with FreeBSD. For a backup solution, if reliability counts more to you than cheapness, save your money, and by a Real Tape Drive some day. Jonathan Bresler reported to be very happy with his Archive Anaconda 2750, this seems to be one of the cheapest drives that offers the quality i would consider minimum standard for a backup solution. (See the handbook section on tape drives.) For faster and cheaper backups, use /dev/null. :-)) You can't beat it pricewise, but anything else below a Real Tape Drive i've seen so far (floppy tapes etc.) seems to compete with /dev/null on the reliability of the stored data. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)