NU105451@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Walter Reed) (02/13/88)
I am looking into the AT&T 6386 pc for use as a BBS. My configuration would be 4 meg ram, 8 port card, tape backup, UNIX V.3, either ESDI controller or the ST-506 one. My question is how reliable are these systems? We can't have the BBS crashing every 2 days... Is the increased expense of the ESDI systems worth it? What kinds of performance increase is there with the ESDI route? Another big question is how do we get big hard drives on this system? The WD controller can only handle 1024 tracks and the ESDI controller only seems to handle 2 drives from what I've heard. Yet Another Quizical Question is Is there a way to step the head to the next track on the tape drive that goes with this machine? Why I ask is that I would like to write a program that would be able to get a file from any part of the tape quickly (the tapes directory would be on disk.) I would like to do this without sequentially going through all the tracks. Thanks for any help you can provide... Walter Reed UUCP ...uunet!ndsuvax!ncreed BITNET NU105451@NDSUVM1 or ncreed@ndsuvax.BITNET