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Date:      Fri, 02 May 1997 23:36:46 -0500
From:      "Jeffrey J. Mountin" <sysop@mixcom.com>
To:        "Ian Vaudrey" <ivaudrey@test.nemko.ltd.uk>
Cc:        <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, <mjanosi@numacorp.com>
Subject:   Re: What to buy?
Message-ID:  <3.0.32.19970502233645.00b04364@mixcom.com>

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At 12:38 PM 5/2/97 +0100, Ian Vaudrey wrote:
>>     Cyrix 6x6 +200 motherboard
>
>The Cyrix processors are reputedly very quick, with the exception of a
>lousy floating point unit. What would worry me is the power
>requirements, at around twice that of the nearest equivalent Intel
>part. This means more stress on the power supply and motherboard, and
>for that matter the higher ambient temperature in your box might not
>exactly be welcome news to your other components.

Not just floating point, which they really lag behind Intel on, but normal
numeric processing, they are somewhat slower.  One reason why I won't touch
them.

>AFAIK, motherboards supporting the 75MHz clock required by the
>Cx686-200 are still pretty thin on the ground. At least one MB that
>does support this seems to have reliability problems of it's own -
>check out the Supermicro newsgroup if you have news access.

Hmmm... does this mean they can be set to 2.5 bus speed now?

--snip--
>>     16x CD-ROM IDE (Mitsumi?)
>
>Again, there have been several reports on this list of problems with
>IDE CDROMs. I'd go for SCSI. You'd probably get much the same
>throughput from a decent 8x SCSI drive as from a 16x IDE unit in any
>case.

A 16X Toshiba SCSI can be had for just under $200, but I don't see why one
would need such speed.  "Wow!  You can install fast!"  and playing CDROM
games, but that's 95.

>>     8 GB SCSI HD (Seagate?)
>
>I've no experience of Seagate SCSI drives, but I've had several of
>their IDE drives fail. The high failure rate of Seagate units has also
>been reported on recently in Computer Shopper (UK). I use Fujitsu SCSI
>drives in my servers with no failures to date.

Best to go with several smaller drives and spread disk IO around.

>>     SCSI Tape Drive (Seagate?)
>
>Travan? No experience of these, so no comments.

FYI, Seagate has DATs and they are basically the Archive Pythons, which I
like and I believe they were bought out by Conner in the middle

Archive Python -> Conner -> Seagate

This kinda stuff makes me dizzy.

--snip--


-------------------------------------------
Jeff Mountin - System/Network Administrator
jeff@mixcom.net

MIX Communications
Serving the Internet since 1990



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