Hello Peter!
Sunday April 05 1998 05:50, Peter Garner wrote to Jonathan Michaels:
 JM>> can you tell me some more, like how it works under load, say
 JM>> in a network, please. tyan's are also just recntly available
 JM>> in australia. they are also well like in frebsd circles
 JM>> (from what i
 PG > I have a Tyan Tiger S1692S (as you know) and it seems fine.
 PG > Once I got the CD Jumper problem fixed, I have had no problems
 PG > with it.  I have Debian Linux and Warp 4.0 running on it.  The
 PG > results from DISKIO are as follows :
noted and stored for future reference ...
 PG > Note Jonathan, that the transfer rate on the 32x ATAPI CD-ROM is
 PG > 14x, EXACTLY as you predicted!  
gosh it gets awkward when you are right once .. thn youhave to repeat the
performance .. drats .. grin.
 PG >   I AM impressed!
now don't get carried away peter, any good mechanical enginaeer could have 
been
just as right once the basic system principle were explained.
 PG >  The one
 PG > thing I would point out in the Tyan vs. the SuperMicro, is that
 PG > I could NOT find a SuperMicro board with 4 DIMM slots in a
 PG > Single CPU model.
this part of thereason i am still not playing with my new toy .. sigh, my
supplierr forgot that the ppro 440fx chipset doesnt support dimms just simms,
he got me 128 mb of really topshelf dimms now he has to wait till i
order another lx or bx chipseted mother bpard to recover his outlay . grim
grin.
most of his customers read the ms win95 cerial box and see pentium 90 with 16
(or whatever it is thesedays) megabyte and that is what they order.
etc etc etc
 PG >   In fact the Tyans were the ONLY single CPU
 PG > boards that had 4 instead of 3 DIMM slots.
not if they are intel 440fx chipset users .. unless they cut and shut thier 
own
technology .. which would explain some of the horror stroies i;ve seen by
direct onservation .. not hersay or even circumstatial evidence. this in part
is why i stayed away from the tyans, not becaue of the problems, but out here
in the boonies (read, anyware not mainland usa) getting it fixed, repaiered
replaced is a real pain in the rectoid mastiff (bum frothose not versed in
latin or not afraid of a normal description od an important part of the human
anatomy .. sort of grin)
 PG >   (There is a Gigabyte
 PG > board that meets this, but I was told Gigabyte recalled it or
 PG > some similiar B.S).
gigabytes are nice if you can get a good one, the australian distributter is
enve half reasonable as regards aftersales servicing, also theu are some 3
minute drve from my home .. unlike the supermicro .. its about 45 mnutes 
rive
each way.
 PG >   Say, what do you recommend for an UW SCSI drive?
let me warn you this is like the mouse asking the cat about the chesse . 
n.
i've been into harddrives for about 8 years now .. about 8 years ago i
purchased my first fujitsu, it was a 5 1/4 inch full height 345 mb esdi 
rive.
when it seeked the whole world knoew it was working, as well as this when it
was operating the top surface was hot enough to keep my coffee drinkable, 
ore
than that hot would be a better description .. it is a noise but utterly
reliable drive it cost me some 8 thousand dollars .. and today it is still
serving files and waking up the mices and cockeroaches when it does its unix
maintenance routines.
isome 6 years ago i purchased my second fujutsu a same chassied 650 mb mb 
csi
2 device (it cost some $2k5) same heatng same noise same everything .. except
it took me five years and one month to kill it .. i tried really hard and one
moring it just stoped working .. 3 weeks after its warrenty expired .. um.
also please note that of the current fujitsu;s they all runf stone mother 
ess
cold and so quiet that you have to know you turned it on or ba able to see 
he
little led it firs up when it initialises or you have extra sehsativ hands
finfures so that when you touch it you can 'feel' the platter rotating .. 
ith
my motoru neiron progreesing io can no longer repteably give you an accurate
answer, my hands (and cns) anre not what they used to be. in an extravagent
manner i am saying they they are very quiet and cool drive that is utterly
reliable but that all of this comes at a price.
since those two intial purchases i have always concidered the 20 to 30 
ercent
premium for the fujitsu to be worth the 'piece of mind' God is the only one 
who
knows howw much i need every bit i can get my hands on.
i have ordered and installed cheaper, seagates, connors, maxtors quantums et
al, at the end of the day they all camme back with dead drives and after 
seeing
the blod stained 660 mb fujitsu (while it was still working) they would go 
he
extra few dollars and install fujitsu. sure thier have been failures, some 
even
catastrophic .. but fujitsu australia took only 30 minutes to organise a
replacement. quantum is the only one that came close to this sort of service.
recently ibm have put out a good line of new scsi3 range of drives that are
competetive to fujitsu in terms of performance (over the long haul) and are
slightly better priced .. tehy are still avout some 10 to 15 percent premium
over the market average. i am about to purcahse a pair, actaully three of the
ibm 4 gb 5400 rpm drives the ultras not the ultrwides, i have limited funds.
these three drives and the supermicro are going to be the freebsd backbone in 
a
dualboot configuration with os/2 as the partner file system in a
desktop workstation sgml document development cycle server sort of thingie.
while i (that is in my personal hardware) have not used other drives (than 
he
fujitsu) i've built hardware for clients oand only the fujitsu has performed
utterly reliably ..i would take the same fastidious care and concern over the
installation of the drivers,and thier support mechanisms as wellas the actual
drives themselves, i;d make sure that i had the current firmware and driver
fixes etc etc. even so the bloody things would still slap my face with
monotonious regularity .. and the cleints would blame me .. they are the nes
who demanded cheap hardware.
another thing i have learned over the years is that a pair of sloer drives
could whoop the pants of a single fasterdrive, especailly in a multi tasking
envoronment .. what i do is to puts the operating system on on drive and some
of the regular tools. on the scond i'd put the application packages and the
spool file (this way i could make i much bigger than i would ordinarily, like
if it was on the same spindle as the os itself), and then on the third drive 

would put the data (read qrite retrieve) stuff as wwell as some special tools
for file system recovery and file maintence.
please not i said third drive, i sometimes use the least active of the two
drives in a two drive setup. now more and more i see that the significant
advantages of the third drive out way the original additional expence of the
third rive.
this way i can effectively use three 5400 rpm drives that run stone 
otherless
cold 24/7 and have significant reliabulity advantages because of theri 'slow'
rotation. this kind of setup can return much much better overall system
performance than one 10 gb seaget baracouda at 10,000 rpm and allo of its
attedant costs .. the incredibe heat genertated the alteration of the case to
ensure adequate cooling of the baracouda as well as the processor and the 
other
internals alos the other small issues assoicated with adrive spinning at 10k
rpm .. some of themore engineering versed could help you here .. i'm just a
poor (demented) irrigation control systems hacker .. how fast does turf grow 
at
any rate  .. grin.
as you can see, i'm really into redundant and ultra relliable systems, even 
t
the expence of instantanious performance figures, which at the end of the day
prove very little, other than how big your ego is .. seeing as i cannot 
fford
a big ego i stick with stuff that works for me and that short of a 
atastropic
sytems faiute like a direct lightening strike or an earthquake, etc etc it is
going to be working when i get up i the morning and every morining.
so mayb i am not the best person to ask ..
well anyway this is n=my two cents worth
ps to the others who may read this, is it possible to setup multiple (on
sepreate physical drives) swap files in os/2 ala freebsd (well ok most 
unicies)
 PG >  þ KWQ/2 1.2i þ If you call me insane again, I'll eat your other
 PG > eye
sorry i got that one already .. wanna share a leg ?
Jonathan
pps, with regards to the blood on my old fujitsu, i droped it one day and 
hen
i realised what was about to happen i put my arm on the ground directly in
harms way .. it didn't brake aanything and my arm was ok too save a deep
gash in one of the bones and some broken skin .. and a broose that took ages 
to
go away .. still hurts from time to time.
see, you have got to talk nicely to your computer, it could just get up and
bite you one day . mine are begning to understand me and we are begginging to
get on well .. grin
... i do what i can, with what i have, are you able to say the same ?
--- GoldED/386 3.00.Beta3+3022
(3:712/808)
---------------