Re: nbd vs. failing HDDs (was Re: Status)
On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 01:58:56PM +0200, Ingo Jürgensmann wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 13:51:10 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>
> >I doubt m68k machines will slow down because of NBD. The very
> >first NBD
> >installation that I did was on quickstep, back when its SCSI
> >driver was
> >still rather crap. It was faster over NBD than it was to local disk.
> >Running Debian/m68k was the reason why I started doing NBD in the
> >first
> >place :-)
>
> Erm! Veto! ;)
>
> On Amigas I get 2-4.5 MB/s from SCSI disks, whereas I rarely got
> more than 400 kB/s via network. Even when I would, all Amiga network
> cards I know and own are limited to 10 Mbps, so you'll never go
> beyond 1.2 MB/s.
> I happened to get 700-900 kB/s under AmigaOS, though.
>
> But yes, on Macs SCSI was always slow, afair... ;-)
I still haven't found the time to get it working in Linux, but I
did find and buy a 100BaseT NuBus card. It even has a chip on it
that appears to be the same one as in some cards that are supported
on x86, so it might even be relatively simple. I don't expect to
actually get close to 100Mb/s out of it since NuBus only runs at
either 10 or 20MHz, but it should beat out the 10BaseT cards.
The SCSI performance on a Mac depends a lot on the hardware. My
IIfx was so slow that I think I let it run for two days doing
a dist-upgrade of a minimal install. The disks do something in
the 100kB/s range as I recall. Most other Macs are much better.
I recently acquired an FWB JackHammer card, which can take 68-pin
SCSI drives. It uses an NCR 53c720, so it should be possible to
get it working and get much better SCSI performance than the
built-in SCSI interfaces of any Mac (including ppc models).
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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