[SunRescue] SCSI vs IDE in a single user U10

[Mike Nicewonger]

Well I am not surprised by the performance difference. All I can say is the
Ultra AXi I have (US 333 2 Mb cache) with the built in Ultra wide SCSI and
an IBM UltraStar drive smokes.

IDE? We don't need no stinkink IDE.

What is the best SCSI card out there for the U5/U10?

Mike N
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Byrne" <chris at chrisbyrne.com>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 12:30 AM
Subject: [SunRescue] SCSI vs IDE in a single user U10


>
> In case anyone is wondering whether the switch from IDE to SCSI is worth
it
> in a U10, all I can say is try it and see.
>
> I finally recieved my Ultra 10 the other day, three weeks after I payed
for
> it (god I hate shipping naything around the holidays)and set it up. The
> system was unopened, new in the box, but almost three years old.
>
> Just an aside on how I got this system. A company had bought a lot of
them,
> then went out of business. Another company recently purchased their assets
> in a bankruptcy auction, and sold me the U10. If you can get in on a deal
> like this it's a great way to get high quality equipment at a reasonable
> price.
>
> Anyway being almost three years old it's an UltraSPARC-IIi 300, with
128megs
> of RAM, and a 4.3gig seagate medalist drive.
>
> I admit that the medalist isn't exactly the paragon of IDE devices thse
> days, but from my perspective the I/O performance of the IDE subsystem was
> pretty crappy. The solaris 8 actually took longer on the U10 than it had
on
> my U2 with fast/wide SCSI-2 drives and a 6x cd-rom. Then I did some
routine
> disk intensive tasks with the system like compiling some large programs,
and
> reviewing logs etc... and I was really unimpressed. The CPU had no problem
> keeping up with everything, but the I/O was just REALLY REALLY slow. My
disk
> perfmeter was continually pegged while the CPU ideledat 1 or 2% waiting
for
> data.
>
> The first thing I did was try replacing the medalist with a nearly new
7200
> rpm Western Digital expert UDMA 66 drive I had lying around. That
definitley
> improved things a bit, but not so much as to make you jump up and shout
> halleluhia if you know what I mean.
>
> I was planning on switching over to a dual 36 gig Ultra 160 setup in the
> near future anyway, but I didn't happen to have all the pieces together
yet,
> so I popped in the cheapass symbios controller card I had lying around (it
> worked out of the box) and tossed on a 4 gig barracuda and plextor 8X
> CD-ROM, and I was smoking.
>
> These are like five year old drives and a majorly cheezy card, and
anything
> I was doing that required more than trivial disk access was 30% or more
> faster.
>
> Now I admit that my disk access patterns are far from typical in that I do
a
> lot of disk intensive multi tasking, but the performance difference was
> notable even during regular tasks like web surfing and email. Any time I
had
> to save or open a large file there was a clearly noticable increase in
> performance.
>
> The only problem I've had so far is that whenever I try and run my
SunPCI-II
> I get segmentation faults, but I think that's a driver issue not a problem
> with the drives.
>
> Anyway just my humble opinion
>
> Chris Byrne
> =======================================
> The eyes may be the windows on the soul
> But the word is the doorway to the mind
> =======================================
>
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