*BSD News Article 26059


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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