>Thanks for those who gave valuable answers, and in particular the URL >to seagate on ATA vs SCSI > >Their summary is > >SCSI disks are better > for random access applications > for multiple disk environments >ATA > optimised for linear access speed > >and the MAJOR difference between SCSI and modern ATA is marketing and >target markets. >(or one interface is pretty much as good as the other!! which satisfies >the technical yearing to understand how one could be better than the other)
The relevant difference between SCSI and ATAPI is that SCSI can handle overlapped requests. In ATAPI, when a request is issued, no other request can be accepted until the results come back. In SCSI, the request and result are separate phases. In other words, ATAPI is like a single queue bottleneck, which is why it bogs down in a highly multitasked environment, and if any environment is multitasking, LTSP server is it in spades. Even on my single user Linux workstation with an ATAPI disk I can easily lock out a process by doing heavy I/O in another process. As far as interface transfer speeds and all that ATAPI can equal or beat SCSI but that's not the bottleneck you hit in LTSP. By all means buy ATAPI if you want to, but don't be surprised if your performance plateaus. Then again, maybe you don't go that high up the curve or you can buy more servers to spread the load. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: VM Ware With VMware you can run multiple operating systems on a single machine. WITHOUT REBOOTING! Mix Linux / Windows / Novell virtual machines at the same time. Free trial click here:http://www.vmware.com/wl/offer/358/0 _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
