About Triton DMA IDE vs. SCSI performance

[backbone!wayne@zuul.UUCP (Wayne Schlitt)]

>                                                               The advantage
> of the on-board disk cache is reduced, as Linux duplicates it with its own
> cache on a faster bus.

On-board disk caches have _one_ advantage over the Linux disk caching:

  * When data is read off the disk, the head almost invariably starts
    to read data at the wrong sector.  This disk has to keep reading
    data until the correct data rotates under the head.  It is _very_
    easy to throw this information into the on-board cache, just in
    case it can be used later on.  


Caching disk controllers, on the other hand, rarely provide much
benefit when used with Linux...  The memory used by the caching
controller is better used by putting it on the motherboard and letting
Linux manage it...


-wayne