> On Thu, 13 Feb 1997 bofh@snoopy.virtual.net.au wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > >Your next disk drives should be SCSI. You will probably never replace
> > >them, only transfer them to other systems when you replace them with the
> > >latest higher-speed, larger-space units when they become available.
> > >One-point-two gigabyte drives are now considered "obsolete", you can get a
> > >few for the cost of a real poor 2 gigabyte IDE drive. The only problem is
> > >you will need a SCSI Controller and they are not cheap. A good one will
> > >set you back maybe US$300.
> >
> > I have read a number of messages related to the quality of IDE drives and WD drives in particular and I believe that I have to respond to give the other side of the story.
> > I have had what I consider to be a reasonable amount of sys-admin experience (including running an ISP for over a year). Currently I run 3 OS/2 servers, 5 Linux servers, 2 NT servers, and quite a few workstations. All the OS/2 and Linux machines have IDE hard drives, most of the hard drives are WD (about 10 WD drives in operation now, but I've gone got rid of a few of the smaller ones - 340meg drives aren't much use now). I have not had a single problem with a WD drive that could be attributed to the drive (mis-use of `rm` doesn't count as a drive problem). However with the NT systems running SCSI drives (Seagate and Maxtor drives mainly with Adaptec, NCR, and DPT controllers) I have had heaps of problems. Strange crashes on boot, data loss in running system, systems booting up and suddenly crashing when previously they had worked fine.
> > Based on the experiences with SCSI the client has now decided to save money and buy IDE - the extra money they spent on SCSI wasn't getting them any extra performance or reliability.
> >
> > As for performance, I recall seeing a message from Mark Lord saying that in most Linux systems you won't gain anything from SCSI. Save the $300 on a SCSI controller and get 64meg of RAM - it'll make your system faster and more reliable than SCSI.
> >
> >
> > Russell Coker
>
[snip]
> Again, on the performance side, I get upwards of 25MB/s on either of my
> Seagate UltraWide scsi devices; a measurement that you are very unlikely
> to see on _any_ IDE drive (note: this is while the system is under
> considerable load, too).
>
How did you measure that 25MB/s ? My 2 Maxtor IDE 2.0G's give me an
'hdparm -T' value (cached xfer) of 32.0MB/s on a Micronics PCI/IDE
M54HI-Plus with a iP200 cpu. (My 'hdparm -t' >4.0 ie non-cached xfer) :-)
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John Heil
South Coast Software
1-714-774-6952 or 1-714-774-6755
kerndev@johnhscs.webworldinc.net
johnhscs@webworldinc.com
scsftw19@mail.idt.net
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