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Date:      Mon, 12 Feb 2001 08:37:28 -0600
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
To:        "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>
Cc:        <questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   RE: Problems installing 4.x on large disks
Message-ID:  <14983.62760.77219.482663@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <002c01c094dd$a3c8c120$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
References:  <14983.36943.315670.474001@guru.mired.org> <002c01c094dd$a3c8c120$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>

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[Replies (finally) pointed to -chat)

> > It's certainly never been anywhere I've been. Most of them were
> > business trying to make a profit, and cost was *always* an
> > object. That's why most Unix workstations (and here I'm talking about
> > RISC boxes running commercial Unix) I've dealt with only had one disk
> > instead of striped disks, and so on.
> Your probably only seeing the small companies then.  It's a different world
> in the large ones.

Given the definition of "small firms" you used below, the answer is
no, not really. Many of them were a few hundred people, but the ones
I'm thinking about ranged from a couple of thousand to nearly 100,000
(DEC).

> In the 2 large software firms I've worked for it was always the same -
> whenever
> an engineer needed a new workstation, you got the best, with total disregard
> of the cost.  The reason for this was pretty simple, and logical -
> spending an extra 2-3K on hardware guarenteed that the hardware that you got
> was
> rock-solid reliable, because with hardware that was less reliable a
> possibility
> existed that a crash could wreck a day or 2 of production for a developer,
> and
> at the rates those guys were being paid, their lost time would eat up any
> $500-per-box
> savings that you could get.

Well, none of them ever bought $500-per-box boxes. On the other hand,
none of them ever made a habit of putting more than one disk or tape
drives on machines (they did, of course, do network backups). Until
recently, they tended to buy RISC workstations, because, as you say -
they were known to be rock-solid reliable. Lately, they've been
switching to PC hardware runing Linux or Windows NT, though people
seldom object if I use FreeBSD instead of Linux.

On PC hardware, in those configurations, you might as well use IDE as
SCSI, because the performance hit is neglible.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.


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