Re: suggestions for udb

[Chris Kloiber <ckloiber rochester rr com>]

Danilo Godec wrote:
> 
> In my opinion alpha is not an option for low-end market. That means
> anything comparable to Celeron machines (or even PII/III) is way too
> expensive on alpha platform.
> 
> This is especially due to bad IDE support (I have a 164SX), which means
> you need to get expensive SCSI card (cause el'cheapo cards don't work well
> with Alpha/Linux), SCSI hard disk, cdrom, burner etc. if you want to enjoy
> speed. Each of items listed are notably more expensive then their IDE
> counterparts. Not to mention 'special' RAM needed by Alpha - I can't buy
> RAM like that in just any computer shop. At least no here in my country.
> :)
> 
> High-end market shows a different picture, though. In price range over 3k
> US$ (I'm only guessing, this margin could be different) you get more
> power/buck with an Alpha as Xeons also get shamelessly expensive. :)
> 
>    D.

Yeah, the IDE sucks on the 164SX in a stock kernel. However a kernel
patch is available which makes it tolerable (~800% increase in
throughput measured by hdparm without tweaking) you can find the patch
for any recent kernel at: 

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedrick/

Chris Kloiber