Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!swidir.switch.ch!newsfeed.ACO.net!Austria.EU.net!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Hacker's Choice for Hardware Date: 22 Aug 1995 01:38:50 GMT Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 31 Message-ID: <41bcfa$pau@reason.cdrom.com> References: <41anih$4m5@news1.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) To: terryl@cs.stanford.edu X-URL: news:41anih$4m5@news1.best.com Here's my current list of "faves" where hardware for FreeBSD systems is concerned: 1. ASUS P54TP4 PCI/ISA motherboard with 64MB memory (128MB in the case of ftp.cdrom.com). You really don't want to swap if you can possibly avoid it and 64MB is the bare minimum for good performance (heck, I have that much in my desktop box - memory isn't expensive enough to make it worth skimping on). 2. Adaptec 2940 or Buslogic Bt946c SCSI controller. If you're going to hang lots of disks off the box, the Adaptec 3940 is also something we're using here in our NFS servers with very good results - it has 2 SCSI busses and represents a lot of bang-for-the-buck. 3. Seagate Barracuda or Quantum Atlas drives. I've had a 50% infant mortality rate with the Quantum Grand Prix drives and will no longer purchase them. 4. SMC or Compex PCI ethernet controller based on DEC DC21040 chip. Seriously, don't even bother with anything else if you're in the networking business. The driver is rock solid and performance is top notch. We run with both the 10Mb and 100Mb (100BT) controllers here and are actually converting everything over to 100Mbit networking internally so that we can do NFS access at raw disk speeds. This requires a Grand Junction hub as well. 5. PCI VGA card of some sort (it's actually helpful to go PCI for as much as you can, if only to avoid unintentional hardware conflicts). -- Jordan