Very Computer

I'm about to embark on putting together a "made for FreeBSD 3.4" system
and would like recommendations from the peanut gallery. It handles a few
dialin lines, a bunch of storage for about 10 clients, web services,
routing, firewall, mail, news, etc... It is headless and a nice video
car isn't necessary (would be a waste) Here's what I'm thinking of so
far:

Supermicro P6DGS (Dual PIII - up to 600MHZ - onboard Adaptec 7895)
20G Ultra-wide drive of some sort (fast - recommendations anyone?)
128MB PC100 DIMM (maybe more)
2 Intel 82559 ethernet boards (already working with FreeBSD 3.2)

I'm sold on the P6DGS as my motherboard of choice at this time (unless
there's an overwhelming reason to consider others, like the P6DGS
doesn't work with FreeBSD).

What I want is a solid, fast responding, high disk throughput machine.
If anyone can recommend a specific 7200RPM/10000RPM Ultra Wide SCSI
drive that works well, please let me know. Thank you!

-->Neil

|Supermicro P6DGS (Dual PIII - up to 600MHZ - onboard Adaptec 7895)

Is on-board SCSI necessarily a good idea, since SCSI controllers
(even less expensive ones like the Symbios-based ones) are still
somewhat expensive?  If you ever have to change the motherboard
or the SCSI controller, you'll be replacing both if SCSI is on the
motherboard.

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: |Supermicro P6DGS (Dual PIII - up to 600MHZ - onboard Adaptec 7895)

: Is on-board SCSI necessarily a good idea, since SCSI controllers
: (even less expensive ones like the Symbios-based ones) are still
: somewhat expensive?  If you ever have to change the motherboard
: or the SCSI controller, you'll be replacing both if SCSI is on the
: motherboard.

Worse yet, changing SCSI controller _may_ mean doing a low-level
format on the drives before they're usable with the new controller.
I know that was the case when I changed from a SIIG controller to
an Adaptec 2930; I hope the various Adaptec controllers all use
compatible formats.

--
Mike Andrews

Tired old sysadmin since 1964

Why is this an issue?  Your motherboards with onboard SCSI cost more
than the boards that don't.  If you want to pay for the onboard SCSI,
LAN, video and multimultia, who cares?  Your commerical grade Unix
workstations and servers have onboard SCSI.  Why is it that we still
have this stigma with onboard SCSI with the Wintel architecture?  The
only issue with onboard SCSI is if you want to upgrade from the onboard
SCSI to the next generation of SCSI technology (i.e. UW to U2W).  I
still consider this issue to be negligible.

I would rather have the onboard SCSI and LAN rather than have them
seperate as it conserves slot space.  It's getting more difficult to
find server grade boards that do NOT have onboard SCSI and LAN.
--

JCA

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Hey guys,

for the disks, use IBM disks. We have great experiences with this drives and
they are better (in my opinion) than the Seagate Cheetah disks... By the
way, isn't the machine a bit low on memory, 256MB will do better...

Mark

IBM, and more of them.

--Steve

Thank you all very much!

Based on information received, I have purchased a Supermicro P6DBE
motherboard (about $180) and a 2940 U2W controller ($179). It has two
Pentium III/550s in it that seem to do great with FreeBSD in SMP mode.
That combination is cheaper than the baseboard with built in SCSI
(thanks for the gentle reminder, Tim). I also have an IBM Ultrastar 36ZX
drive on its way, too.

Thanks for the pointer on the memory size, but at this point I don't
feel it's needed. At 128 megabytes in my PPro 200 machine, it never hits
swap anyway. It's just dog slow on the disk drive (IDE). ;-(

-->Neil