Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 6 Nov 1999 13:18:42 -0800 (PST)
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@phone.net>
To:        freebsd-smp@freebsd.org
Subject:   forwarded message from Mike Meyer
Message-ID:  <14372.39730.659338.440569@guru.phone.net>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
[This is now *way* off-topic for smp - but where should it go?]

sthaug@nethelp.no writes:
;->> > ;->With your typical
;->> > ;->1- or 2-drive system, IDE drives shouldn't be significantly slower than
;->> > ;->SCSI.
;->> > 
;->> > My tests show different - see <URL:
;->> > http://www.phone.net/home/mwm/disktest/disktest.html >. If there's
;->> > something I can do to improve the performance of the IDE drive, I'd
;->> > love to hear it.
;->> 
;->>      Did you explicitly configure your kernel to enable DMA?  I couldn't
;->> find any mention of that on your page.

No, I didn't. I just pulled the line from the GENERIC kernel and used
that. The obvious question is why isn't DMA & multi-block read enabled
by default in GENERIC? Since the flags indicate a *probe* for those
capabilities, the kernel should still work for all systems, right? And 
most modern system should have controllers/drives that can use these
things - and they make a *huge* difference - at least for me.

;->I'd say that the picture is not at all clearcut any more. My tests
;->indicate that SCSI drives still have an edge on EIDE drives for random
;->access, but it's not huge. The CPU usage is lower for SCSI in some
;->cases, but not all.

Well, the claim was that for multi-drive systems SCSI still has an
advantage. I can't test that one. Not sure what tests to use, either.

;->The DPTA-372730 is one darn fast disk!

The raw data for the Maxtor - properly configured - indicate that it's
not very far behind.

You didn't say whether you had softupdates on. Adding the dmesg output 
for the drives would probably help.

Speaking of which, here's the dmesg on the two drives in my system. Is
there anything obvious that would improve the throughput on these
drives before I start testing again?

Nov  6 12:23:58 guru /kernel: wdc0: unit 0 (wd0): <Maxtor 91024U4>, DMA, 32-bit, multi-block-16

Nov  6 12:23:58 guru /kernel: da0: <SEAGATE ST39173W 5958> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device 
Nov  6 12:23:58 guru /kernel: da0: 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 15, 16bit), Tagged Queueing Enabled
Nov  6 12:23:58 guru /kernel: da0: 8683MB (17783240 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 1106C)

	Thanx,
	<mike


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?14372.39730.659338.440569>