Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 00:17:54 -0800 From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> To: Veggy Vinny <richardc@csua.berkeley.edu> Cc: isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: /usr/obj size Message-ID: <199611050817.AAA15590@MindBender.serv.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 05 Nov 96 00:11:27 -0800. <Pine.PTX.3.95.961105000637.13095n-100000@soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU>
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>> > On the topic of hard disks, what are the minimum requirements to >> >run a FreeBSD machine as a news server with a full news feed in terms of [...] >> You'd serve yourself well to peruse http://www.freebsd.org/ and look >> for the newsgroup archives. Joe Greco, and others, have posted much [...] > I'll take a look at the newsgroup archives first and see since >everyone has been giving me different answers of what the minimum is. The minimum is a 500MB hard drive and a FreeBSD installation. But that won't do you much good. :-) News is an ever consuming beast. You will never have "enough" disk space. (This is assuming a full feed.) It puts a good load on the CPU, I/O subsystem, and memory, as well (assuming you have clients reading news, and not just other server feeds). >> To get you started, he recommends many smaller drives, probably 2GB >> each, striped with ccd, across multiple SCSI controllers, if possible. >> NCR/Symbios 53c8xx cards or Adaptec 2940/3940 cards would work best >> (until the BusLogic driver gets tagged-command-queuing, at which time >> it theoretically should be as good as the other two). > Hmmm, would 4 GB drives work as well in this area and do I need to >get 7200rpm drives or would 5400rpm do well? The machine will already >have a Seagate Elite 9 ST410800W 9.1 gig Fast Wide SCSI-2 HD with the >Adaptec 2940UW controller to start with. It will work. But the point is that you'll get much more performance out of 4-5 2GB striped drives than you will out of one 9GB drive. 4GB drives will also work, of course, but once again, you'll get more performance out of four 2GB drives than you will out of two 4GB drives. The reason I keep saying 2GB is because that seems to be the current "sweet spot" where the price per gigabyte is lowest, and the performanc is at least "good". Of course 7200RPM drives are faster. But, if you can buy an extra drive or two, and put that in the stripe set, with the money you save by going 5400RPM, that extra drive might just make up the difference in speed. So, to say it the other way around: no, you don't need 7200RPM drives. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@MindBender.serv.net --< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >-- NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3, Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32... NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others... -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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