[ On Tuesday, August 6, 2002 at 19:24:52 (+0200), Lubomir Sedlacik wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: motherboard recommendations?
>
> On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 07:11:06PM +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> >
> > i don;t know any real IDE raid on motherboards.
> 
> that's why i wrote 'pseudo'.

Then what do you mean by "pseudo RAID"?

If you just mean software RAID, which is what it seemed from your
original post, then the "RAID" requirement is irrelevant -- all you need
is an IDE controller well supported by NetBSD.  RAIDframe can do
mirroring with any pair of reasonably matched disks.

> > but using master/slave config is bad idea and will slow down
> > everything.  better just buy extra PCI IDE card and put every disk on
> > another channel.
> 
> it's not that critical.  the slave devices will be for user data and the
> reliability is more important than the actual speed.

I think the point is that the second disk on the secondary channel will
slow down accesses to the primary disk too.  Just buy a second
controller (they're quite inexpensive) and put every disk on a primary
channel.  You might put a CD-ROM used only rarely on one of the
secondary channels.

>  - ECC memory support is a plus

I'd say it's an absolute requirement.  However I've yet to get a good
answer about how well, or even if, NetBSD supports any ECC memory
controller on any i386 hardware.  It certainly doesn't work on one of my
P-Pro motherboards, and I've no idea if it works or not on my IBM
PC325.  Both machines have ECC support in the BIOS, and have wide enough
memory for it to work, but at least the P-Pro machine sufferes random
failures that are likely do to bad memory, and occasionally it gets
dropped into the debugger with an NMI, but I've never seen either
machine say anything anywhere about ECC, and I can't really find any
special support in the kernel sources for ECC, so I'm guessing there is
no ECC support in NetBSD/i386 -- you just have to enable it in your BIOS
and hope you never ever get an uncorrectable error (or an undetected
error after correctable errors have been silently corrected behind your
back with no warning of impending failure).

I should probably just ditch all my i386 hardware and stick to sparc and
alpha where I know better ECC support is available.  Anyone want to
trade?  :-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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