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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!news.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.msfc.nasa.gov!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.ida.org!usenet@ida.org From: ganderso@ida.org Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: IDE Hard Disk questions Date: 13 Jun 1996 12:48:55 GMT Organization: IDA, Alexandria, Virginia Lines: 20 Message-ID: <4pp2no$334@news.ida.org> Reply-To: ganderso@ida.org NNTP-Posting-Host: ganderson-pc.oed.ida.org X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2 I recently acquired a new, 2.1Gb IDE hard disk that I would like to install FreeBSD 2.1.0-RELEASE onto. The question is, in the BIOS setup, should I use "LBA" which forces a drive geometry that is different from the actual geometry, or "NORMAL" with the correct drive geometry. FreeBSD does seem to be able to use the entire drive using "NORMAL" and correct geom., but DOS's fdisk can't. The drive's manual says to use LBA if the controller supports it (mine, on the motherboard, does), but the manual is *very* DOS-centric. I'm interested in getting the best possible performance out of the disk, and it will not have any other OS or boot manager or anything like that on it. On a related note, can anyone provide any relevant insights on performance differences between an EIDE drive on a PCI-based controller versus a SCSI drive, with similar seek and spindle speed, on an ISA-based host adapted (specifically, an Adaptec 1542b)? I've been using only SCSI for the past several years, but in the 2.1Gb range, the EIDE drives are literally half the cost of SCSI drives. Thanks in advance for any relevant feedback on either or both of the above, -Andy (ganderson@ida.org -or- ganderson@os2bbs.com)