Re: HOWTO - Speed up IDE HD's - raid
Thus spake Roger Chrisman (rogerhc@pacbell.net):
> Mike Fedyk wrote:
> > > These fancy tricks might not be worth it though if your system bus is
> > > 33MHz. My two PIII servers have 33MHz system bus (PCI host bridge). So I
> > > don't think it would be worth the trouble on my servers.
> > >
> > > Someone who knows more about RAID please tell me if I am mistaken about
> > > that.
> >
> > Oh, I think it'll be useful. Remember, PCI at 32bits and 33Mhz can
> > transfer 132MBytes/sec, and your drives won't fill that up. Also, once you
> > start seeking, your disk throughput goes down radically.
>
> Mike,
>
> Thanks for this. I have a couple IDE drives sitting around so might try this.
> I had thought the 33MHz mother board host bridge (aka system bus?) was going
> to be the bottle neck on my old PIII board.
>
> Any book suggestions or other resource suggestions where I might read more
> about PCI bus speeds, mother board host bridge speeds, and this kind of
> hardware performance math?
There seems to be considerable confusion about PCI bus speeds. The
latest PCI spec (2.2 IIRC) allows for speeds of 33 or 66MHz, but most
motherboards still run at 33 (and most adapters ditto).
OTOH the *memory* bus may well be running at 800MHz or faster. But
that won't help disk speeds.
--
|Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept. | Music does not have to be understood|
|Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada| It has to be listened to. |
|email: dbarker@camosun.bc.ca | |
|phone: +1 250 370 4452 | Hermann Scherchen. |
Reply to: