From owner-freebsd-hardware Fri Aug 11 15:52:26 1995 Return-Path: hardware-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id PAA17377 for hardware-outgoing; Fri, 11 Aug 1995 15:52:26 -0700 Received: from penzance.econ.yale.edu (penzance.econ.yale.edu [130.132.32.100]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with SMTP id PAA17362 for ; Fri, 11 Aug 1995 15:52:19 -0700 Date: Fri, 11 Aug 1995 18:54:29 -0400 (EDT) From: -Vince- To: "Rodney W. Grimes" cc: Michael Smith , john@zyqad.co.uk, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade to my machine In-Reply-To: <199508110859.BAA03829@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: hardware-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk On Fri, 11 Aug 1995, Rodney W. Grimes wrote: > ... > > > 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... Now my question is how do you figure out what the mounting point is for each drive? Cheers, -Vince- vince@kbrown.oldcampus.yale.edu - GUS Mailing Lists Admin UCLA Physics/Electrical Engineering - UC Berkeley Fall '95 SysAdmin bigbang.HIP.Berkeley.EDU - Running FreeBSD, Real UN*X for Free! Chabot Observatory & Science Center