On Sep 17, 2009, at 5:25 PM, nestamicky wrote:
> Here of course I'd > appreciate feedback, given the particular project of deciding whether > the SCSIs drives and cards I've discussed would, by themselves, > produce > an appreciable speed benefit compared to using IDE drives. There's a lot of lore out there about the superiority of SCSI drives. Some of it is based in reality, some of it is akin to "Marking the edges of my CD's with green marker makes the sound richer." hooey. The percieved speed of any system rests on four legs: CPU RAM Video I/O (this includes both Disk and Network performance) If any one of these is the bottleneck, changing the other three will never help. 10K enterprise SCSI drives hooked up to UWSCSI interfaces can blast data at astonishing rates...until, that is, they hit the congested two- lane road that is the Yike's 100Mhz bus. You will get noticeable improvements, especially if you're now using old 4200 rpm IDE drives, booting and running off of those SCSI disks, but whether or not it's worth the hassle of dealing with the additional heat and noise of SCSI drives, which believe me, is considerable. Simply running the swap off of them is only going to be noticeable if you're RAM-starved and hitting swap a lot. Cheaper, quieter and faster to just max out the RAM. If you're still swapping a lot AND you've maxed out the RAM in the system, that's a Sign from Dog that you need a new computer... you're trying to do stuff that's beyond the capabilities of the existing one. To get the full performance out of those SCSI drives you need to go to a system that can keep up with them, meaning something like a Wind tunnel or MDD G4. If you're not RAM starved, imo the best 'bang for your buck' is not ever-faster drives, but a faster CPU and better video. A Radeon 9000 PCI card (it may be the 9200, I forget) will make your Mac MUCH more responsive in the GUI, which is what 90% of the time people want when they say they ant a 'faster computer'...most people don't tax their CPU or I/O that much. The best way of gauging what needs improvement on your system is the wonderful pref pane called Menu Meters <http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/ > which will let you watch threee of those four legs: memory, Disk and Network speed and CPU utilization. IUnstall 'em and watch what's going on as you use your computer. Look for any of the measurements that climbs up and hits a plateau. Is your drive access a solid line, instead of a bunch of peaks and valleys? Is your CPU always pegged at 100%? Is free RAM always down under 20 megs? When you have criteria and data you can identify the actual causes of slowness. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
