New parts for new PC (need help - little knowledge of hardware)

[Vulpes Velox]

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:33:08 -0800 (PST)
Mark Terribile <materribile at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> [This reply is tardy, I know; please accept my apologies]
> 
> >>> Next is ... a mother board. I am wanting a ASUS just because I hear
> >>> alot of people talking about it on the forums, ...
> >> ...
> >> Take a look a ABIT's motherboard, some of them are really good.
> 
> I had a very bad experience with an ABIT motherboard.  When FreeBSD
> started, it saw three NICs instead of one; when it tried to initialize
> one, it wiped the field-upgradeable BIOS.  The machine wouldn't even POST.
> I destroyed two boards this way; fortunately the vendor (who doesn't have
> a FreeBSD support person) gave me a break on the Gigabit that I replaced
> it with.  There's a FreeBSD trouble ticket on this; I can hunt the number
> down if you like.  But I would recommend avoiding putting ABIT and FreeBSD
> together unless you have support for the combo, or a report that that exact
> motherboard works with FreeBSD.  The Gigabit, BTW, has run like a champ.

Never tried ABIT befor, but I have had two machines with Gigabit mobos and they
ran quite nicely.
 
> > Finnally if you can afford it scsi is diffenetly better than ide, but
> > I'm sure most people will think that is over kill.
> 
> IDE drives can be flakey on their DMA support.  I'm using an IBM Deskstar
> as a rotating backup and it hung the FreeBSD device probe on discovery.
> I have it set to use PIO, which sucks the CPU up through a firehose.  I'm
> running on a set of three 10,000 RPM IBM SCSI Ultrastars that I bought right
> after Hitachi bought IBM's drive business and before the disk price rose
> again.  They run hot; I have them in a mounting cage salvaged from an old
> machine, with space between them and between them and the side of the cage,
> set right in front of the 120 mm inlet-side case fan.  In this configuration,
> they have run like champs, lightning fast and no noisier than the fans.

I have had very good luck with Seagate EIDE hard drives. I personally advoid any
hdd made by IBM or Western Digital. I am not sure about Samsung. I have also had
good luck with my Maxtor drives.

For most purposes ATA100 works perfectly. They are cheap and work decently.