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Re: Where to buy PC hardware in Vancouver/SCSI

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Curt Sampson (cjs@cynic.net)
Sun, 9 Jan 2000 22:02:58 -0500 (EST)

On Sun, 9 Jan 2000, Dave Martindale wrote:

> For home
> general-purpose use, you really don't need Ultra2 equipment, but
> Ultra speed stuff seems pretty common.

I'd *strongly* recommend going with LVD (U2W) stuff over UW stuff
if you're buying SCSI. The cost difference is not great, but it's
a lot more reliable. (Not that UW is unreliable, but with LVD you
can get away with a lot more when it comes to cabling a system.)
I suspect that had it not been for penny-pinching on the part of
some vendors, differential SCSI would have been much more common
all along, and a lot of people would have saved a lot of hair when
trying to diagnose problems with a SCSI bus.

However, I don't recommend SCSI unless you really need a lot of
speed, and are using a disk array of some sort. Modern IDE drives
are just about as fast as their equivalant SCSI drives in a
single-drive setup, and considerably cheaper.

As an example, last time I went out and put together a high
performance disk system (this was about a year ago), I purchased
a pair of 9 GB Barracudas (which I striped) and an Adaptec 2940UW
SCSI controller. This gets me close to 30 MB/sec transfer rate
reading from the disks, and cost about $1500. A pair of 9 GB IDE
drives, which would have given me the same amount of storage but
speed of only about 14 MB/sec reading, would have been about
$600-$700.

For me it was worth it, because this is the system I use for building
NetBSD, so it's heavily dependant on disk I/O speeds. (A typical
build will read and write a gigabyte or more of data, even with a
large buffer cache.) If you're not doing something so disk-dependant,
it might not be worth while to spend the extra money.

cjs 

-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   917 532 4208   De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.
The most widely ported operating system in the world: http://www.netbsd.org

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