Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 19:57:01 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> To: frankd@yoda.fdt.net (Frank Seltzer) Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Comments wanted on new system Message-ID: <199607180257.TAA07745@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.94.960717205327.19368B-100000@Kryten.nina.com> from Frank Seltzer at "Jul 17, 96 08:57:01 pm"
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> On Wed, 17 Jul 1996, Rodney W. Grimes wrote: > > > I would highly recommend _not_ getting this board, it uses the Orion > > chipset, which is older and known to have certain bugs. ASUS is now > > in production with the PCI/I-P6NP5 board based on the newer Natoma > > chipset, the boards are still on allocation, but I am not having much > > problem getting them. > > > > What kind of problems exist in the Orion chipset? One more time.... Chip sets belowing stepping B0 have a PCI bus mastering bug that prevents data tranfer rates to reach much beyond 4.4MB/s on the PCI bus. There is a fundemental flaw in the design of the chipset/CPU interface logic as well, that will never be fixed which has a significant impact on CPU/Memory bandwidth. > > > You might want to consider the Micropolis MC4421, new on the market, but > > at an attractive price/performance point for 2G drives (street price should > > be less than $550.) > > I have heard a lot of horror stories about Micropolis drives. Is this a > better unit than previous drives? I have heard horror stories about _ALL_ drive manufactures, most of them blown far out of proportion. Yes, even some about Micropolis. Far more about Conner and Seagate though :-) :-). As far as I can tell the MC4421's seem to be just fine, but then horror stories don't usually show up until the drive has been shipping for 3 or 4 months, and this drive just became avaliable in volume. Given that it is basically a revision of the MC4221 (which has been out for over a year, with little known problems) I would say it has as good a chance as any other 2G drive on the market. Ohh.. and avoid HP SureStore drives... they've decided they can't be in the disk drive market any longer, they where loosing money at it and I suspect a large portion of that ``loss'' came from the number of dead drives they had to replace, now there's a horror story. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD
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