Re: Hardware opinion: Slow SCSI or fast IDE

On Sun, 4 Sep 2005 16:16:52 +0100, Johnny B Good
<jcs.computers***@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>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.
>

Stumbled on my 2.12 (Acer OEM) disks the other day and recall
discussions about ESDI or SCSI. Our first was ESDI also :)

> 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.
>

I'd agree that the processor would not make much difference as it was
not the limiting factor in file and print sharing.

> 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.

You don't seem ever to have gone SCSI. How many users?

>
> 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. :-(
>

I though Netware 5 could handle terabytes -
http://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/dnd19990102.html


> If 'oodles of disk space' is only going to involve drives smaller than
>120GB, ok,

oodles relative to the existing 2gb drive :) like I mean 6gB


--
AnthonyL
.