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Date:      Thu, 3 Oct 2002 16:25:07 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com>
To:        Sean Farley <sean-freebsd@farley.org>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Slow I/O responsiveness with UDMA133
Message-ID:  <20021003162004.L71443-100000@patrocles.silby.com>
In-Reply-To: <20020930140925.G5254-100000@thor.farley.org>

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On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Sean Farley wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Sep 2002 21:14, Mike Silbersack wrote:
>
> > Rumor has it that newer drives cannot write a single sector at a time,
> > and instead must read a whole cluster of sectors, add in the new
> > sector, and write back the whole cluster.  That behavior sounds like
> > it would hurt sequentual performance substantially, as it would become
> > a lot of read-modify-write operations.
>
> That is interesting.  I had not heard of that issue, even as a rumor,
> before.  I see this hurting byte writes, but block writes may not be
> hurt by it.

The concept isn't that ridiculous.  If the drive cannot write 1 byte at a
time, why should it be able to write 4096 bytes at a time, or 8192 bytes,
etc.  Unfortunately, I doubt that any drive manufacturer will tell us the
exact figures. :)

> You would not happen to have a non-RAID, UDMA100+, non-VIA system that
> you could run bonnie++ (-s256) on?  It would at least show to me if my
> system is really all that far from the norm.
>
> Sean

Nope, not here.  Maybe someone else on the list can send you results...

Mike "Silby" Silbersack


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