Search Again: Re: Time to upgrade... From: Shawn Hogan Date: Monday, May 10, 1999 Time: 1:04:25 pm Sean Larabee wrote: >Well, after the most annoying NT Server install of my life and a few >Microsoft induced crisises, I finally got to try a test upgrade on the >PII. It took about an hour and fifteen minutes. Feels about right >compared with the times we are seeing on the P166. > >The newer IDE drives and interfaces are giving the SCSIs a run for the >money with regards to both performance and CPU sucking. Many are now >benchmarking (for what that is worth in the real world) at or better than >SCSIs. > >But yeah, the current server and the test box I just played with are both >IDE. > >I take it there is no hidden Super Rebuild Indexes button that will cut >our upgrade times in half? Arguing from personal incredulity is not >convincing, but I have a hard time believing a G3-333 is doing much larger >upgrades in half the time due to raw computing power alone. Well, I would say that it's a combo of a faster CPU + Ultra2 SCSI + high performance SCSI drive. SCSI vs. IDE goes beyond the CPU utilization and raw speed benchmarks... If you are making large, sustained reads/writes, the newer IDE/controllers are comparable to SCSI. Unfortunately, in real-world that is rarely the case. With servers in particular, it's much more common to have many tiny read/writes, which is where SCSI makes a noticable difference. SCSI controllers have a better queuing/buffer system than IDE controllers (at least what I've seen). So when making thousands of small read/writes (such as with a web server, or upgrading Optigold ISP), the IDE controller is going to be a bottleneck when compared to a SCSI controller. So yes, as I'm sure you know, benchmarks can be pretty much made to look like anyone has an advantage. And yes... IDE is comparable to SCSI (speed-wide at least) if you are making large sustained read/writes, but not really with tons of smaller ones. Aside from that, I don't know mcuh. :-) I'm not a hardware guy, nor do I ever aspire to really be one. I just know what I read and what I experience in the real world. - Shawn ------------------------------- Shawn D. Hogan President, Digital Point Solutions http://www.digitalpoint.com (619) 452-3696 ------------------------------------------- To subscribe, unsubscribe and list archive please visit http://www.optigold.com/lists -------------------------------------------

Messages In This Thread: Re: Time to upgrade... by Sean Larabee on May 10, 1999 at 12:33:01 pm Re: Time to upgrade... by Shawn Hogan on May 10, 1999 at 1:04:25 pm