If a drive can shovel it's info off at a rate of around 30M/s sustained, what relative speed can the computer process it at? Or is there a correlating measure?
In other words, am I wasting my time on the S900 by using an ATA133 card and drive, if it won't draw and process data at a rate worthy of the drive's speed?
The memory bus in the PowerSurge family, which includes the S900, seems to be capable of up to about 80 - 100 MB/s. I'm working from memory here, but I think that was the top rate Kaye Yum managed with some really hopped up PCI SCSI cards and RAIDed disks on a Power Tower Pro.
So you still have a bit of head room there. However, there are always details. You don't really need an ATA-133 card with today's drives unless you're going to try an ATA RAID. But given that the ATA-133 is the current standard, and they're not very expensive, there's really no reason to avoid them either. You might save a few bucks in the used market, but warranty and support and all that.
Some PCI cards perform worse than others in our old machines. I can't get better than about 14 MB/s writes with my VST UltraTek/66 card. Others have reported similar experiences across the PowerSurge family. Reads are up in the mid-20s but writes are slow. Also, performance seems to be heavily influenced by CPU speed with the VST ATA card, which is inconsistent to what I've heard about how ATA should work. But there it is.
Has anyone gotten good Sustained Data Rates (as measured by something like Express Pro-Tools from Atto) in their Write performance with any of the ATA cards? Meaning up above 20 MB/s.
To be fair, the sales literature for the VST card claimed that it was not compatible or maybe not supported on machines before the Blue and White, so it's kind of a bonus that it works on ours at all. I mainly bought mine for the bundled copy of SoftRAID--$90 for the bundle, $250 for the software alone, at the time.
So, as usual, it boils down to try things and see. And read what others have tried and decide if you trust their methodology and reported results. When disk rates are discussed, I see a lot of folks (in general, not on this list) report Peak Data Rates as their disk performance instead of Sustained Data Rates.
Jeff Walther
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