From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Feb 12 6:37:33 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 48CDD37B503 for ; Mon, 12 Feb 2001 06:37:29 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 24942 invoked by uid 100); 12 Feb 2001 14:37:28 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14983.62760.77219.482663@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 08:37:28 -0600 To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" Cc: Reply-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Problems installing 4.x on large disks In-Reply-To: <002c01c094dd$a3c8c120$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> References: <14983.36943.315670.474001@guru.mired.org> <002c01c094dd$a3c8c120$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.89 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [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. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message