Rob , .... let me please put some doubts on the figures claimed by such kind
of vendors ... ;-) ..
No FLAME at all , but ... 15 years in hardware sales are driving my
behaviour ... a ''raw'' access to a wild animal like a SCSI 160 through a
SCSI 160 controller ... TODAY ... is unbeatable specially for LOOONG files
like ours (images) . (in our environment)
An array can take a lot of advantages from a wise use of caching algorhythms
(too many h ???) ... and thus the data claimed can be foolishing a lot ...
in facts ... I have demonstrated (at work) how wild beasts like 10000rpm
SERIAL disks without any cache (buth with many parallel paths) can
outrageously outperform mega cached (32GB cache) arrays ... handling files
with a SINGLE DATA FIELD of 64GB .... on a 2 Terabyte sub-set of a huger
file system .
NO WAY ... in these cases (we are in the same situation if you think we have
HUGE files with HUGE records ... and not many files with small records ...
and sometimes repetitive !!!) to have arrays going faster than ''raw''
access to faaaaast disks .
BTW ... the array made 60MB/s sustained throughput ... the wild serial
beasts made 160MB/s sustained throughput ... on the same sub-set of data (2
Tera) .
(in this case sustained for almost 4 hours continuously)
... the net result ? ... the customer bought 115Tera of raw wild animals ;-)
... and I won the bet vs. my colleagues ... ;-)
Sincerely.
Ezio
www.lucenti.com e-photography site
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob Geraghty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2000 12:20 PM
Subject: Re: filmscanners: Second Hard Drive
> Ezio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Photoshop and other I/O bound applications receive a great help in
> speeding
> > up from I/O ... MORE than upgrading the clock of the CPU.
>
> Anyone wanting more IO speed at a reasonable price might want to think
about
> an IDE array. Promise make an IDE RAID card - check their web site and
> you'll find a link to a comparison of a 2 drive array with a 15K rpm SCSI
> drive. The array performs pretty well. I find myself constantly
frustrated
> by waiting for scans to load and save. My second hard drive is an old
mode
> 4 5400rpm drive - the CDROM drive actually reads a scan file faster than
the
> old hard drive!
>
> Price for an array: 2 x IBM 7200rpm 15GB drives + Promise RAID Controller
> total cost about US$330
> The cost of a SCSI 3 adapter and a suitable SCSI 3 drive would be quite a
> bit more.
>
> Rob
>
>
