[3864] in linux-scsi channel archive
Re: [BACK ON TOPIC] SCSI & IDE
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert HYATT)
Thu May 7 20:04:22 1998
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 19:01:40 -0500 (CDT)
From: Robert HYATT <hyatt@cis.uab.edu>
To: Mr M S Aitchison <physmsa@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>
cc: linux-smp@vger.rutgers.edu, linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <199805072251.KAA27297@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>
On Fri, 8 May 1998, Mr M S Aitchison wrote:
>
> > I don't see this, so long as you are talking a single drive system. IE
> > I have an IDE 4 gig drive in my gateway notebook, and had a similar
> > machine with a single SCSI drive a while back, and the speeds were pretty
> > much identical.
>
> Suppose you start with a single *IDE disk, fast and cheap, on an SMP
> Linux system you assume won't need much file access 'cause it is going
> to be number crunching all day. Then you need more disk
> capacity/performance, so you add SCSI. Assuming you use hdparm for
> best IDE performance will it still drag down the performance of the
> system?
>
> I suppose it depends on what the EIDE is used for. If it is just
> "system files" (/var, /usr, etc) or just swap, could it impair CPU
> performance (given the Linux 2.0 system call "bottleneck"
> especially)??
>
> Would you REMOVE the IDE?
>
I currently have a 4 processor P6/200 machine with UW scsi disks. I
recently had a dual-processor PII/300, but with IDE disks. We ran an
application on both that had a lot of computation, plus a lot of file
I/O. the SCSI system toasts the IDE system pretty badly. But for a
single-user machine, IDE isn't awful, just not as good as SCSI if you
have multiple disks...
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mark Aitchison, \_ Phone: +64 3 364-2947 home 337-1225
> Dept of Physics & Astronomy, </ Fax: +64 3 364-2469 or 364-2999
> University of Canterbury, /) Web: www.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~physmsa
> Christchurch, NEW ZEALAND. (/' E-mail: M.Aitchison@phys.canterbury.ac.nz
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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