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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!vic.news.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!news.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!news.sprintlink.net!news-stk-200.sprintlink.net!news.mathworks.com!newscaster-1.mcast.net!informatik.uni-bremen.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!uni-erlangen.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: IDE Hard Disk questions Date: 15 Jun 1996 19:02:27 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 42 Message-ID: <4pv1c3$84e@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4pp2no$334@news.ida.org> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E ganderso@ida.org wrote: > 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. Hmm, i'm sounding like a broken record here... There's no such thing like ``operate with the correct drive geometry'' for all modern drives. Every and all of them are *always* translated, it's only that you've got a choice about which translation to use. If the drive is FreeBSD and FreeBSD only, you can select any geometry you want when using the ``dangerously dedicated'' mode. Select A)ll FreeBSD in the partition editor, and answer the next question about the way ``compatible with other systems'' with ,,No''. This will place the BSD bootstrap in place of the MBR, and the only requirement for the BIOS then is to have at least 15 sectors per track. Of course, this won't leave any room for a boot manager, so don't use it on the first drive of a multi-boot machine. (``Dangerously dedicated'' :) > 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,... FreeBSD doesn't support EIDE DMA modi, so an EIDE machine will basically suffer from a higher CPU load. This makes an IDE machine with a i586/166 appear slower than an i586/100 with a good SCSI subsystem when it comes to higher CPU loads like a large compilation. Btw., the differences between similar drives (same manufacturer, same drive, but different interface) are not that high. So if your IDE disk is significantly cheaper, it's also risky to be crap. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)