Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 21:18:27 -0500 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: Graeme Tait <graeme@echidna.com> Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, info@boatbooks.com Subject: Re: Choosing a system for FreeBSD. Message-ID: <199808190218.VAA06649@nospam.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from Graeme Tait <graeme@echidna.com> of "Tue, 18 Aug 1998 10:46:46 PDT." <35D9BE06.1627@echidna.com>
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Graeme Tait writes: > > Since my partner has a love affair with Dell, it looks like we will use a > Dell XPS R400, 128 or 256MB ECC 100MHz SDRAM, 10GB Ultra ATA IDE > (probably with a Duplidisk RAID 1 mirroring system - see separate post), > with 3COM 3C905 ethernet. Ditch the IDE. Use 2 or 3 4G SCSI HD's. You'll get much better performance under load if you distribute the spindles you are seeking. Even better to have two SCSI buses. An example: I have everthing on this system on one 9G SCSI HD. Bonnie can wrench 9MB/sec sustained out of it. Spying on the system using "systat -v" while "cvs update" is running shows about 600k/sec on average. While /usr/src is being updated if I kick off another to update /usr/ports at the same time the thruput drops into the 300k to 400k/sec range. CPU utilization is around 2% to 5%, hard to say how much of that is cvs and how much is X. The favored FreeBSD NIC is the Intel 10/100 board. Same price or less than the 3Com. David Greenman likes it, that's good enough for me. > This covers the essential stuff for the web server. There also will be a > EIDE CD-ROM drive, which I have no details on. Any comments so far? I > assume this hardware should be supported OK. Oh, it will work. But once again SCSI is favored. The CDROM is not going to see high use so ATAPI might be Good Enough. Not going to backup your system? I suggest a DDS-3 tape drive. I've been very happy with Archive/Seagate DDS-1 and DDS-2 drives. SCSI of course. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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