And, with x86 (or any IDE) you have the option of buying a 120GB
disk for not much money and moving the data from festival of low
perf disks to one medium perf disk.  (low perf presumes decstation
means MIPS, not alphas with 15kRPM disks on LVD scsi).

Depending on what the machine does, 
dump over a network to the new box and run it over the weekend,
then do an rsync after shutting off all decstation services
to catch diffs.

Quoting Simon Burge (simonb@wasabisystems.com):
> Yoseff Francus wrote:
> 
> > My main machine is a decstation running netbsd 16. with 2 internal disks
> > and 4 external disks (scsi). If I moved to a differen platform (sun or
> > intel) would the data disks be movable to the new platform easily or
> > would it require a dump, newfs, restore?
> 
> If you change to a big-endian platform you'll need to make sure you
> have the FFS_EI option enabled.  In this case, your filesystem will be
> slightly slower than a newfs'd one since the kernel is doing a little
> extra work.
> 
> You may have to save the output of "disklabel sdN" for each disk and
> manually re-create the disklabel on each disk - I had to do this when
> moving disks from an alpha to a i386.
> 
> Simon.
> --
> Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
> NetBSD Support and Service:         http://www.wasabisystems.com/