Gert Doering wrote:
> Any Ball you wrote:
>> How slow is the ATA interface on these machines?  
> 
> I'm not sure there is a word to adequately describe its slowness.  VERY slow.

Yeah, you really don't want to use it for anything else than
at most just root file system (no var, no usr, no home).

But since you can't get a small new IDE drive, you'll end up
wasting dozens of giga bytes of a new drive, unless you have a
reliable old 1 gig drive or something similar available.

> (I'll move my disks to a promise PCI/IDE controller "real soon" and have
> the system boot from a CF card "just to load the kernel")

When my root disk failed a short while ago, I changed my Ultra 5'
to boot from CD, loads only kernel from there and then mounts root
from a cmdide attached drive. Works without problems.

The internal IDE controller has a very curious failure mode when
a drive fails: when writing to disk, at least small amounts of
data, netbsd kernel shows no errors at all, not even when
unmounting. But when rebooted, none of the changes made to the
file system are on the disk. I've had this happen to me with
two drives now.