From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Dec 31 14:29:03 1995 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id OAA22601 for chat-outgoing; Sun, 31 Dec 1995 14:29:03 -0800 (PST) Received: from ulc199.residence.gatech.edu (root@ulc199.residence.gatech.edu [199.77.162.99]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA22596 for ; Sun, 31 Dec 1995 14:28:58 -0800 (PST) Received: (from ken@localhost) by ulc199.residence.gatech.edu (8.6.11/8.6.11) id RAA10850; Sun, 31 Dec 1995 17:28:40 -0500 From: Kenneth Merry Message-Id: <199512312228.RAA10850@ulc199.residence.gatech.edu> Subject: Re: 4 Gig SCSI disks. To: chuckr@glue.umd.edu Date: Sun, 31 Dec 1995 17:28:40 -0500 (EST) Cc: chat@FreeBSD.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8a] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk (note: I originally just sent this to Chuck, but he wanted to see it go to the list as well. And sorry about the delay Chuck...I'm 'away' from my net connection until Tuesday, and only check mail via long distance. ) > I don't follow the magazine ads closely enough (too busy with classes is > an excuse that seems to work) but I need to know what the present idea of > a good deal on a 4 gig SCSI drive is (I'm thinking of expanding). Does > anyone have any recent numbers they'd care to share? Well, lesse. If you go for a Quantum Grand Prix, look for something under $1000. If you go for a Micropolis 4 gig, look for something a little over $1000. (like $1030-1050) If you want a Quantum Atlas, they'll probably be in the mid 1100's to the mid 1200's. If it's more, it's probably not a good deal. I'm not sure about the Connor drives, I suppose something around $1000. Barracudas will probably run you about what the Quantum Atlases will.... As far as what's 'recommended'...well, I've seen pro and con for just about every drive. The Grand Prix drives have gotten mixed reviews, I'm not sure whether net.opinion is pro or con on those. The Barracudas are known to run hot. I think if you keep them _well_ cooled, they should do fine. I've heard good and bad about Micropolis as well. I dunno about Conner. I have a Quantum Atlas in my machine (model # XP34300, the XP34301 is a Grand Prix, so make sure you know what you're getting!) The 4 gig Atlas has 2 megs of buffer on board, and I can get some pretty decent throughput with it. For example: --- IOZONE writes a 39 Megabyte sequential file consisting of 4992 records which are each 8192 bytes in length. It then reads the file. It prints the bytes-per-second rate at which the computer can read and write files. Writing the 39 Megabyte file, 'iozone.tmp'...6.390625 seconds Reading the file...7.695312 seconds IOZONE performance measurements: 6399133 bytes/second for writing the file 5314204 bytes/second for reading the file ---- The machine is an i486/100, 32 megs of ram, Adaptec 2842, FreeBSD 2.1.0. I'm not sure why the writes are faster than the reads. Anyway, hope this helps some. Hope I didn't ramble too much. :) Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@ulc199.residence.gatech.edu Disclaimer: I don't speak for GTRI, GT, or Elvis.