Date: Fri, 11 Aug 1995 01:59:32 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: john@zyqad.co.uk, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade to my machine Message-ID: <199508110859.BAA03829@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <199508110900.SAA03139@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Aug 11, 95 06:30:32 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
... > > 5. For 1GB disk would 2*500MB disks be preferable to 1*1GB? Could then > > configure 2 swap partitions. > > Generally, the 1G disk will perform better than a 1/2 price 500M unit, > so two disks is false economy. This is absolutly the opposite of the real situation. 2 disk drives of 1/2 the size and identical performance characteristecs give you 2 spindles that can be doing data trasfer at the same time and with proper load balancing gives 2 times the over all performance. I have sold off _all_ of my 1 and 2G drives and now stack 535MB 5400RPM 4.4MB/sec drives up to meet what ever capacity I need. My make world times are down 45 minutes or so due to running accross 3 disk drives (1 src, 1 obj, 1 system binaries, all three have swap areas (but then, with 32MB you never swap during make world if nothing else is going on). I also happen to be running a fast enough CPU/Memory subsystem that even with this setup make world waits for disk I/O 28% of the time :-(. I have the time down to 3 hours 19 minutes (not building profiled libs, and not gzipping man pages, A80502-100 w/256K 8nS PB cache, 32MB memory) Infact I can sell you more bang for the buck in 535MB 5400 RPM drives right now than I can in a 1G drive, not by much, but a few dollars. And just getting your home direcories off the system spindle is a _big_ help in system response. > > 6. In a mixed IDE/SCSI system (assumes answer to 1 is yes) can the boot manager > > handle booting from the SCSI drive if one of the IDEs is the default boot? > > You can only boot from the first two disks in the system. IDE disks count > first, then SCSI, so you can only boot from a SCSI disk if there's only > one IDE. If you have only scsi disks you can boot from drive 5 if you like, unless someone again has broken that piece of code :-(. > > I'll upgrade the processor at a later date and put in more memory then. > > I'd put your priorities as disk, memory, processor in that order. Good rule of thumb. > Hope the opinion's some use... I hope mine is too... -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199508110859.BAA03829>