Re: Two hdds on one channel - why so slow?

Mark Hahn
2002-01-03T01:52:04Z

On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Ricky Beam wrote:
...
> IDE is just fine for toys. It's a serious pain in the ass for any serious
> work.

my goodness; it's been so long since l-k saw this traditional sport!
nothing much has changed in the intrim: SCSI still costs 2-3x as much,
and still offers the same, ever-more-niche set of advantages
(decent hotswap, somewhat higher reliability, moderately higher performance,
easier expansion to more disks and/or other devices.)

> It takes expensive hardware RAID cards to make IDE tolerable. (and
> I'm not talking about the 30$ PoS HPT crap.)

besides having missed the last 2-3 generations of ATA (which include
things like diskconnect), you have clearly not noticed that entry-level
hardware with PoS UDMA100 controllers can sustain more bandwidth than
you can hope to consume (120 MB/s is pretty easy, even on 32x33 PCI!)

> PS: I once turned down a 360MHz Ultra10 in favor of a 167MHz Ultra1 because
> of the absolutely shitty IDE performance. The U1 was actually faster
> at compiling software. (Solaris 2.6, btw)

yeah, if Sun can't make IDE scream, then no one can eh?