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

C S Hendrix (shendrix@escape.widomaker.com)
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 14:10:21 -0500


In message <Pine.LNX.4.04.9812121632340.5572-100000@england.local.net>, Eric Le
e Green writes:

> On Mon, 7 Dec 1998, C S Hendrix wrote:
>
> > Regarding DPT controllers: really, they aren't that great. I like
> > them, and a lot of people told me before I got it that it was the
> > best thing since sliced bread. Easy to program, and very fast.
> > But I've been somewhat disappointed in the speed. Granted I only
>
> What kind of speed are you getting? What dos "hdparm -t" say when you do it
> on your DPT?

Well, I never really trusted hdparm, but I get this on the first
wide scsi drive:

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 32 MB in 6.87 seconds = 4.66 MB/sec

A couple of minutes ago I got 5.25 MB/sec for the same drive.

The RAID devices I have get just about identical values from hdparm.
I question what use it is for testing my SCSI system because
I believe a simple large I/O benchmark (time copying a gig or
something) shows the drives to be faster than hdparm.

Lemme check...

OK, 431318 Kbytes in 4 minutes, 35 seconds.

That is about 1.5MB/sec, to and from the same md device.

Technically you double that to get throughput since it was reading
and writing that chunk of data.

I personally think this system should be faster than that. It is
a DPT 2044W, dual PPro running Linux 2.1.124, Dario's DPT driver
with all the performance goodies checked, and dual Seagate Hawk
fast-wide SCSI drives. I know those drives aren't the fastest
around, but they aren't terrible either.

--
Shannon - shendrix@widomaker.com - www.widomaker.com/~shendrix/myresume.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just
stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system,
*for free*'." -- Linus Torvalds

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