Federico Lupi writes:

 > 2) NetBSD doesn't like the Asus 40x ATAPI CD?

Hmmm. I have one of these in my alpha, as cd0 (master on second ide
channel).  It's idendified as ASUS CD-S400/A V2.1H

I just did a dd to /dev/null - ~320K/s

The same dd of the same disk in cd1 (a 4W8R CW-7582 slave to the asus)
gave me 900K/s

so, theory 2 might hold some weight.

NetBSD/alpha 1.4K current - 2 weeks.

--
Dan.