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Date:      Thu, 19 Oct 1995 12:30:52 +0100
From:      Gary Palmer <gary@palmer.demon.co.uk>
To:        Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: SCSI HD recommendation 
Message-ID:  <694.814102252@palmer.demon.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 19 Oct 1995 11:23:28 BST." <199510191023.LAA02700@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> 

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Luigi Rizzo stands accused of writing in message ID
<199510191023.LAA02700@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>:
>I have to buy a large (>= 4GB) SCSI HD, and have been offered
>the following:

>    Fujitsu 4.3GB
>    Micropolis 4.3GB
>    Micropolis 4.3GB AV (?)
>    Micropolis 9.1GB
>    Micropolis 9.1GB AV (?)

>(don't know what the "AV" stands for, those "AV" models are about 5% cheaper
>than the other ones).

ERRR??? AV means ``Audio/Video'' (or something), and they do strange
things (probably have a whacking great big on-board cache) so that
when the drive auto-recalibrates it doesn't slow down any transfers
too much, so that digital audio/video applications won't notice the
disk going off and doing housekeeping.

Hence, they are normally (at least) 5% >>MORE<< than the ordinary
drives.

>Any recommendation on which of the above are known for good/bad
>performance/reliability ?

news.cdrom.com has a 9.1Gb Micropolis 1991 in it. Seems to do the job,
and with our news feed it gets the socks knocked off of it fairly much
24 hours a day. It does have a (note: one. Not bad out of 9Gb :-) )
sector error now which I haven't had a chance to look into properly,
but I'd imagine that auto-remapping isn't enabled for some reason.

I would make one comment: throwing a lot of data onto a 9Gb drive and
then random accessing it is possibly not the hottest of ideas. 2 4Gb
drives would be a lot better (esp. as you tend to get 4Gb drives with
higher spindle speeds than most 9Gb drives). I think that if I had to
rebuild the news server for some reason, I'd do that, despite the fact
it would possibly make management more difficult.

Gary



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