Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 01:23:35 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NCR or Adaptec? Message-ID: <199508160823.BAA18985@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <199508160807.RAA28115@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Aug 16, 95 05:37:24 pm
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> > I'm in the process of speccing up my new PCI wonderbox, and I'm > looking for commentary on the relative merits of NCR 53C810 vs. Adaptec > 2940 when it comes to PCI SCSI controllers. My benchmarks on running ``make world'' on the exact same system, only chang being swapping an ASUS SC-200 for an adaptec 2940 showed a 10 minute delta in favor of the adaptec on a 3 hour 27 minute run time. This machine is an ASUS PCI/I-P54TP4XE with 256k of 8ns PBurst cache, A80502-100 SX963 CPU, 32MB of 60nS memory, Compex ENET-32PCI ethernet, DEC/Quantum DSP3053L disk drive. > > The particular NCR card I'm being quoted on is the ASUS PCI SC200. Hope your not paying too much down in .au land for this stuff! > I'll be talking to a 4G Seagate Hawk (ST15230N) and a Sony CDU76S > with it initially, and probably an Exabyte EXB8200. Given you are talking to a single disk drive, I doubt that the AHA2940 is worth the $300.00. The place this controller starts to pull away seriously from the NCR card is in either 3 or more disks on 1 controller, or 3 or more controllers on the PCI bus. I do not have good data on multiple controller aha2940 setups, but I do know that the NCR rolls off in total bandwidth at 3 or more drives on a single bus, or more than 3 controllers doing concurrent access. This occurs before CPU cycle saturation, so it is not a CPU bottleneck. > Any comments? If the Adaptec is worth the extra $300 or so, I'll bite. IMHO, not for a single user or single disk system, you'll never create the I/O load to use the advanced features of the aha2940, and thus save the $300 and spend it else where. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD
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