Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 09:45:06 -0000 From: "Simon Gray" <simong@desktop-guardian.com> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Cc: Mark Terribile <materribile@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: New parts for new PC (need help - little knowledge of hardware) Message-ID: <00dd01c3af4a$fafcfb70$1100a8c0@dtg17> References: <20031120073308.73227.qmail@web21107.mail.yahoo.com>
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> >> Take a look a ABIT's motherboard, some of them are really good. > > I had a very bad experience with an ABIT motherboard. When FreeBSD > started, it saw three NICs instead of one; when it tried to initialize > one, it wiped the field-upgradeable BIOS. The machine wouldn't even POST. > I destroyed two boards this way; fortunately the vendor (who doesn't have > a FreeBSD support person) gave me a break on the Gigabit that I replaced > it with. There's a FreeBSD trouble ticket on this; I can hunt the number > down if you like. But I would recommend avoiding putting ABIT and FreeBSD > together unless you have support for the combo, or a report that that exact > motherboard works with FreeBSD. The Gigabit, BTW, has run like a champ. I've got an abit be6-II with p3-866 512meg, running 5.0 never crashed on me once, not had a single problem with it under fbsd - Rock solid. >> Finnally(sic) if you can afford it scsi is diffenetly(sic) better than ide, >> but >> I'm sure most people will think that is over kill. >IDE drives can be flakey(sic) on their DMA support. I'm using an IBM Deskstar >as a rotating backup and it hung the FreeBSD device probe on discovery. >I have it set to use PIO, which sucks the CPU up through a firehose. I'm >running on a set of three 10,000 RPM IBM SCSI Ultrastars that I bought right >after Hitachi bought IBM's drive business and before the disk price rose >again. They run hot; I have them in a mounting cage salvaged from an old >machine, with space between them and between them and the side of the cage, >set right in front of the 120 mm inlet-side case fan. In this configuration, >they have run like champs, lightning fast and no noisier than the fans. Subsequently in that same machine I've got 2x IBM deskstar's (20gig 60gxp's) running on a promise tx pro2 as raid-0 (at udma100) again without any problems I think it depends on your mother board chipset, but both my intel (bx) and via (kt266) have run in dma without any problems under 4.x and 5.x. Scsi is definatly the way forward (if you can justify the cost) it handles more concurrent connections better, plus the lower seek time makes quite a bit of difference. I only fit deskstars in my machines - they've been good to me over the years. They do run hot, ensure the 'air hole' isn't covered up and that they've got decent air flow around them.
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