>OK.. I warned you... stupid hardware questions to follow..

The Asus motherboard, and the Pentium Pro, should work well.  Tons of
people running NetBSD and FreeBSD on them.

>* Adaptec 2940UW

Get a 3940 and spread your drives over multiple busses (a 3940 is
essentially a dual-2940-SCSI-bus on a single card).  Or get a few
Symbios/NCR 53c810 cards (like the Asus one) -- they're cheap.

Can anyone speak for the stability of the 53c810 under NetBSD 1.2.1?  I
know it's very well tested under FreeBSD.  Are there cheap ultra
and/or wide Symbios/NCR 53c8xx cards out there?  Are they supported on
NetBSD 1.2.1?

>4GB Seagate Barracudda Wide
>9GB Micropolis 1991AV (I swear "micropolis" must be an ancient word
>			meaning "Bad Drive")
[...]
>I'm considering getting a few scsi adapters and more disks and spreading a
>ccd interleave across them... any comments? is ccd considered stable
>enough for "production environments" ?

Oh definitely buy more, smaller drives.  Don't bother with that 9GB
beast.  Get a whole bunch of 5400RPM 2GB drives, and spread them over
multiple SCSI busses, then stripe them with CCD.  Read Joe Greco's
ultimate news server recommendations on the FreeBSD lists.

CCD is as stable as the rest of NetBSD.  Many people use it for the
main filesystems in important servers.  CCD came from NetBSD, but the
FreeBSD guys are making big waves with it.  Some of the biggest news
servers on the net are FreeBSD machines with CCD-striped drives
(essentially the same CCD that is in NetBSD).  These are *very*
disk-intensive environments.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                           michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
        --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
    NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
        Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
    NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------