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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:7983 comp.windows.x.i386unix:6550 Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.windows.x.i386unix Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!usc!sdd.hp.com!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!caen!malgudi.oar.net!wariat.org!kf8nh!bsa From: bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery) Subject: Re: If you were to assemble a new machine... References: <crt.758474839@tiamat.umd.umich.edu> <J6y7Fc1w165w@oasys.pc.my> Organization: Brandon's Linux box and AmPR node, Mentor, OH Date: Sat, 15 Jan 1994 16:58:08 GMT Message-ID: <1994Jan15.165808.10213@kf8nh.wariat.org> Lines: 36 In article <J6y7Fc1w165w@oasys.pc.my>, othman@oasys.pc.my (Othman Ahmad) says: +--------------- | > a little tinkering. Mitsumi CD-Roms were good drives for the buck, but | > stick with a SCSI CD-Rom drive, not something proprietary. | | Are you willing to pay almost double for no improvement in performance? | Mitusumi IDE is supported by Linux and sooner or later by FreeBSD. +--------------- Depends on what your limitations are. A SCSI host adapter takes one bus slot and supports 7 devices; if you're short on available bus slots, there are distinct advantages to this arrangement. One card instead of three for 2 hard drives, SCSI tape drive that lets me exchange tapes with the Sun at work unlike floppy-tapes and holds more anyway, and CDROM. And I can add more hard drives without taking up *another* slot for a second controller. +--------------- | > SCSI IDE Drives. You can have up to 7 per card instead of 2/card. They | > tend to be faster. They are... Just get them. ;) | > | You don't have compatibility and upgrade problems with IDE, the controller | is on the hard disk. Unless you need more than 2 hard disks, which I have come | across but my casing only support 2 easiliy. +--------------- The performance of dual IDE drives is lower than on SCSI: the IDE "bus" has very poor contention management and doesn't support interleaved access (e.g. send commands to both drives at once). DOS doesn't care about this, but *ix performs much better when it can take advantage of this; Linux certainly does, I would expect that *BSD does as well. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery kf8nh@kf8nh.ampr.org bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org "MSDOS didn't get as bad as it is overnight -- it took over ten years of careful development." ---dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca