Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 17:27:32 -0600 (CST) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> To: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> Cc: "Koster, K.J." <K.J.Koster@kpn.com>, "'Olivier Nicole'" <on@cs.ait.ac.th>, hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: Panic at setup time Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0101241620010.65986-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0101241345370.7905-100000@beppo.feral.com>
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On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, Matthew Jacob wrote: > If you're getting an extra card, which is what I thought *you* > were talking about, I was ssuming server, not desktop. Sure, it wouldn't make much sense to buy a new ATA33 add-on card these days, unless it was just really cheap. But then again, there is no reason to buy a new ATA66 or ATA100 card if the interface you currently have is already fast enough, which is highly likely. > The newer IBM drives can do tagged operations, and in any case, > you have dual channels- whether it's slave or master, the quicker > you burst the data, the better. If the whole xfer is on drive > cache, you want to move it as quickly as possibly (for reads), or > you want to fill the drive cache as quickly as possible. Let me point out first that I'm not disagreeing with your statement above. It is completely true as it stands. :-) I realize that getting the data in and out of the drive cache fast is a good thing, but right now, the bottlenecks lie elsewhere, and the lower bus transfer latencies won't even put a dent in the total latency when you figure all of the other much greater latencies that are part of a typical transaction. IMHO, the ATA66 and especially the ATA100 interface was developed to play the marketing numbers game, in part to try to keep up with the ever-faster SCSI bus (which can potentially take some real advantage of the increases, unlike the horrible IDE/ATA/ATAPI architecture), and in part just because people think bigger numbers are cooler, not to remove some long-standing or even near-future bottleneck. However, we're not any worse off by having these interfaces, they certainly won't hurt performance. I just think they were designed to give you the feeling that you have something "really outdated and slow" if you don't have them, just as the processor wars do. I'm just trying to say don't go out of your way to get it, since it isn't worth the trouble, IMHO. If you happen to buy a new system with it, great. If the new system doesn't have it, no big loss. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For IA32 and Alpha architectures. IA64, PPC, and ARM under development. http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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