From owner-freebsd-hardware Mon Oct 23 8:38:47 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from gatekeeper.tripos.com (gatekeeper.tripos.com [192.160.145.62]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 99F8237B479 for ; Mon, 23 Oct 2000 08:38:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by tripos.com (8.8.8+Sun) id KAA26797 for <@firewall.tripos.com:freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG>; Mon, 23 Oct 2000 10:38:43 -0500 (CDT) Received: from unknown(172.20.5.15) by gatekeeper.tripos.com via smap (V5.5) id xma026247; Mon, 23 Oct 00 10:37:30 -0500 Received: from tripos.com ([172.20.152.158]) by tripos.com (980919.SGI.STAND) via ESMTP id KAA22042 for ; Mon, 23 Oct 2000 10:36:36 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <39F45AE4.ED8E4530@tripos.com> Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 16:36:04 +0100 From: Steve Coles X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en-gb] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Promise Ultra-ATA100 vs FastTrak 100 Speeds Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I have both of these Promise controllers. There has been a lot of press that these are the same cards, and I seem to remember that FreeBSD treats the FastTrak as just an IDE controller, so can anyone enlighten me on the vast speed differential between the two: Approx. Methodology ------------------- I attach 2 similar IBM 20Gb ATA 100 disks to each in turn, with appropriate cables, make a ccd stripe on the whole disk area and test the speed with dd at various block sizes / stripe sizes / FastTrak BIOS configuration. For all tests the transfer size was about 2Gb at the beggining of the disk, source / destinations = /dev/null or /dev/zero. Summarised Results ------------------ 1) One drive alone (no ccd) reads and writes at 30 Mb/Sec 2) Ultra 100 reads and writes at 29 MB/sec 3) FastTrak 100 writes at 50 MB/sec, reads at 48 MB/sec These results, within experimental error, are irrespective of: 1) Drive / IDE channel assigment - ie 2 cables Master+Master v. 1 cable Master+Slave 2) FastTrak BIOS configuration (FreeBSD just sees the plain drives) Questions --------- 1) Why is the Ultra so slow ( constructive answers only please :) ? 2) If I add another drive to the FastTrak will I see a similar (75% approx) performance increase ? 3) Does the FastTrak BIOS do anything ? Steve To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message