From owner-freebsd-hardware Fri Aug 11 02:00:42 1995 Return-Path: hardware-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id CAA12532 for hardware-outgoing; Fri, 11 Aug 1995 02:00:42 -0700 Received: from gndrsh.aac.dev.com (gndrsh.aac.dev.com [198.145.92.241]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id CAA12525 for ; Fri, 11 Aug 1995 02:00:39 -0700 Received: (from rgrimes@localhost) by gndrsh.aac.dev.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id BAA03829; Fri, 11 Aug 1995 01:59:32 -0700 From: "Rodney W. Grimes" Message-Id: <199508110859.BAA03829@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> Subject: Re: Upgrade to my machine To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 1995 01:59:32 -0700 (PDT) Cc: john@zyqad.co.uk, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199508110900.SAA03139@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Aug 11, 95 06:30:32 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2206 Sender: hardware-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk ... > > 5. For 1GB disk would 2*500MB disks be preferable to 1*1GB? Could then > > configure 2 swap partitions. > > Generally, the 1G disk will perform better than a 1/2 price 500M unit, > so two disks is false economy. This is absolutly the opposite of the real situation. 2 disk drives of 1/2 the size and identical performance characteristecs give you 2 spindles that can be doing data trasfer at the same time and with proper load balancing gives 2 times the over all performance. I have sold off _all_ of my 1 and 2G drives and now stack 535MB 5400RPM 4.4MB/sec drives up to meet what ever capacity I need. My make world times are down 45 minutes or so due to running accross 3 disk drives (1 src, 1 obj, 1 system binaries, all three have swap areas (but then, with 32MB you never swap during make world if nothing else is going on). I also happen to be running a fast enough CPU/Memory subsystem that even with this setup make world waits for disk I/O 28% of the time :-(. I have the time down to 3 hours 19 minutes (not building profiled libs, and not gzipping man pages, A80502-100 w/256K 8nS PB cache, 32MB memory) Infact I can sell you more bang for the buck in 535MB 5400 RPM drives right now than I can in a 1G drive, not by much, but a few dollars. And just getting your home direcories off the system spindle is a _big_ help in system response. > > 6. In a mixed IDE/SCSI system (assumes answer to 1 is yes) can the boot manager > > handle booting from the SCSI drive if one of the IDEs is the default boot? > > You can only boot from the first two disks in the system. IDE disks count > first, then SCSI, so you can only boot from a SCSI disk if there's only > one IDE. If you have only scsi disks you can boot from drive 5 if you like, unless someone again has broken that piece of code :-(. > > I'll upgrade the processor at a later date and put in more memory then. > > I'd put your priorities as disk, memory, processor in that order. Good rule of thumb. > Hope the opinion's some use... I hope mine is too... -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD