From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Sep 27 10:40:35 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id KAA07917 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 27 Sep 1995 10:40:35 -0700 Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA07865 for ; Wed, 27 Sep 1995 10:39:05 -0700 Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id KAA10470; Wed, 27 Sep 1995 10:35:13 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199509271735.KAA10470@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: PC configuration advice wanted. To: davidc@pdd.3com.com (David Clear) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 10:35:13 -0700 (MST) Cc: questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <12620.9509271029@isolan.pdd.3com.com> from "David Clear" at Sep 27, 95 11:29:34 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 971 Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > I'm very close to buying what Gateway here in the UK call a > a "P5-90 Premium Multimedia". This has: > > P90 Processor > 16MB EDO RAM ^^^^ Implies Triton chipset and PCI bus > 1Gb EIDE disk > Quad speed CDROM > 17" Vivitron monitor > 2Mb Graphics card (ATI Mach 64 (?????)) The IDE interface on most of these Triton/PCI boards is an RZ1000. The RZ1000 is known buggy. 1/3 of all IDE controllers are RZ1000. They can't handle an interrupt while doing DMA. This won't bother you on FreeBSD, but on Win95 and Linux, you will get silent data corruption. On Win95, you can work armound it by losing most of your system performance by turning off 32 bit disk I/O. Personally, I'd recommend an NCR SCSI controller, which is about $40-$60 US. For bigger disks, the prices are the same or lower for SCSI. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.