Re: Hardware opinion: Slow SCSI or fast IDE

The message <431aaddf.3077224@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (AnthonyL) contains these words:

> I need to make a short term 3.12 (yes, that's not a typo) server.

> The existing box is a 486 66mhz 128mb ram with a 2Gb SCSI drive and
> 10mbit card serving around 8 users. The box only has 16bit slots.

> I could try to replicate the above or more easily grab a spare PIII
> 350mhz, 256mb RAM 100mbit PCI card with oodles of disk space on the
> IDE drive.

> Although I've always adhered to using SCSI drives for servers I
> suspect that the faster IDE drive with extra cache memory available
> will run rings around the older 486 machine.

> What do you reckon?

Unlikely to make a blind bit of difference. My first experience of
netware was 2.15C on an 8MHz 286 box (NEC PowerMate 2, as it happened),
with 600MB ESDI disk.

I upgraded the MoBo to a 386SX33 one and saw very little improvement.
Having upgraded to a 386 cpu based system, I was then able to ditch the
2.15C and install 3.11 which I quicly upgraded to 3.12 which I was using
up until a few weeks ago when I replaced it with a Debian based samba
server.

After installing 3.12, I regularly upgraded the hardware through 486,
SKT7 P166, SKT370 Celeron 466 and (briefly) skt370 p3/500 and finally
back down to an under volted and underclocked skt7 K6/500 (running at
250MHz) reducing the power consumption to a mere 29 watts with a single
250GB Seagate drive.

In all that time and in spite of upgrading from the on-board udma33 IDE
to a Promise ata100 lba48 controller card, I never saw the write
performance go above 1.4MB/s using 100Mbps NICs. The read performance
was only about 4 times faster at best.

I gave up on this NOS on account of the 'slow by design' writing
performance and also on account I couldn't use hdds larger than 120GB in
spite of all my efforts at finding a solution to the speed and size
limitation issues. The 'vapourware' claims for no disk capacity limits
obviously only applied to, as yet, undeveloped and radically different
future versions of Netware. :-(

If 'oodles of disk space' is only going to involve drives smaller than
120GB, ok, otherwise forget it with 160GB and bigger. If the MoBo
supports LBA48, don't expect faster than 1MB/s writes regardless of
whether you're using 100 or 1000Mbps NICs. :-(

HTH

--
Regards, John.

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