Re: Dumb question: Which is "better" SCSI or IDE disks?

Mike Jagdis (mike@roan.co.uk)
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 14:53:18 +0000 (GMT/BST)


On Sat, 12 Dec 1998, Eric Lee Green wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > What? Join the real world but. Raid-1 doubles read throughput and the
> > slowdown of writes is negligable.
>
> Sorry, but I don't find that in actual benchmarks. Perhaps it is true
> with some RAID controllers, but definitely not with the ICP-Vortex GDT
> 6517. I get the same throughput from RAID1 on that setup that I get
> from the bare Seagate Cheetah on that setup (no RAID).

It's perhaps worth mentioning that different hard disks can
behave *very* differently. I have two controllers with a
variety of matched pairs of RAID0 striped hard disks. All the
disks give 6-7MB/s individually using hdparm. The IBM pair
happily give ~11MB/s regardless of the RAID chunk size. The
pair of Seagates *only* get the expected ~11MB/s when using
a chunk size of 32k. Anything more or less and the performance
collapses back to around ~7MB/s. It looks like (these) Seagates
have "strange" caching strategies :-).

Moral: RAID is not a panacea. As with all IT you can't take
anything on spec. Every "fact" has to be checked and double
checked...

Mike

-- 
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