From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 19 05:04:31 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id FAA18984 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 19 Oct 1995 05:04:31 -0700 Received: from palmer.demon.co.uk (palmer.demon.co.uk [158.152.50.150]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id FAA18978 for ; Thu, 19 Oct 1995 05:03:48 -0700 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by palmer.demon.co.uk (8.6.11/8.6.11) with SMTP id MAA00696 ; Thu, 19 Oct 1995 12:30:53 +0100 To: Luigi Rizzo cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: SCSI HD recommendation In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 19 Oct 1995 11:23:28 BST." <199510191023.LAA02700@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 12:30:52 +0100 Message-ID: <694.814102252@palmer.demon.co.uk> From: Gary Palmer Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk 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