From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Aug 28 10:13:36 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.100.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 11C2537B422 for ; Mon, 28 Aug 2000 10:13:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA306208; Mon, 28 Aug 2000 13:13:27 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <39aa81fb.27249289@mail.afnetinc.com> References: <39aa81fb.27249289@mail.afnetinc.com> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 13:13:47 -0400 To: efinley@efinley.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: softupdates VS. SCSI (Greg Lehey) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 3:27 PM +0000 8/28/00, Elliot Finley wrote: >Hello, > I was thinking about softupdates/IDE VS. softupdates/SCSI. >It doesn't seem like the SCSI has much advantage as far as >writing to the disk. But it _does_ seem like the SCSI would >have a _big_ advantage when reading from the disk because it >is able to reorder the reads to be more efficient. > > So the question to all you drive experts (Greg are you >listening?) is: does this sound right? Not that I am a disk expert, but I think the main question is whether this machine has multiple disks. A second important question is WHAT KIND of IDE (ata33, ata66, ata100) vs WHAT KIND of SCSI (regular, wide, ultra-wide, etc). What are the spindle speeds of the drives? If you have a single-disk system, then chances are you can get fine performance from the latest IDE drives. I think it is only when you're getting into multiple-disk setups that you would be likely to see a big advantage from SCSI. Assuming you have a limited budget, you would probably be better off buying a faster IDE drive than buying a drive "just because it's scsi". The fastest scsi is better than the fastest IDE, but is it really going to make enough of a difference for your purposes to be worth the money? It depends on the details of the specific components you are considering. (note: I do actually prefer scsi, but then I do have systems with multiple hard drives in them...) --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message