Re: usb and firewire performance on sgi O2
Hi, sorry for slow reply - I've been rebuilding boxes the last few days.
I can't tell you exact performance numbers, as I do not at this time have
an external USB/FW hard disk. I might just borrow one from work and see
as I'm curious too.
What I can tell you is that I've burned lots of DVDs and CDs under USB 2.0
without issues. On R5K-180, I've burned DVD media in my 4x burner with
reported data rates of 2.1x to 4.0x from growisofs. For CDs, I think it
was in the range of 10-15x for RW and 15-20x for -R. So basically, the O2
is saturating the burner; this while running X with me doing interactive
things like email or such on transparent mlterms. Min buffer fill was
typically 92%.
R5K-200 is of course noticeably smoother while doing all this. :)
I also have ripped video tracks from DVD with it using Mplayer's
dumpstream feature. Again I've never timed it, but have no problems
pulling off 1-2GB tracks in a few minutes.
I never did get back to playing with the firewire side of things.
If you're looking to slap on massive storage at cheap IDE prices, then USB
on O2 seems like a legitimate option to me.
Regards,
-S-
On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Giuseppe Sacco wrote:
Hi,
we exchanged a few emails, on debian-mips, back in April about a network
card for the SGI O2 machine. Now I am working again on that machine and I
need a large disk space, so I was wondering if performance on the external
disk via USB2.0 or firewire is higher than on using the internal SCSI
controller.
The internal SCSI controller has a throughput of 20Mbytes/s and is
probably using DMA transfers. Do you have any numbers for transfer rates
using the USB 2.0 or firewire connections?
I thank you very much,
Giuseppe Sacco
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