On Sat, 2001-12-22 at 16:56, Jon Pennington wrote:
It may be a long Winter, but it's looking pretty good right now. :)
DAMN!!! I just checked PriceWatch (http://www.pricewatch.com/), did a search for EP-DR02P3, and found that this little bugger can be had for $20US!!! Of course, it costs $13 to ship it, but that still makes for a $33 IDE-RAID card for LINUX! I have an EPoX MVP3 motherboard (I *really* like EPoX products, except for those based on Intel chips) that needs a new ATA controller, and this looks like the PERFECT solution! With Windows (I don't know about Linux yet), when paired with IBM Deskstar 75GXP or 60GXP disks, you can also enable SCSI-style command tag queueing, which reduces processor load and improves disk throughput *significantly*. See the HighPoint web site for more information: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/tagqueue.htm They used to have a graph showing the performance increase, but I can't seem to find it anymore. Maybe we should email somebody and see if this is implemented in the Linux driver yet... :) Right now, I have this installed: IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586 IDE [Apollo] (rev 06) hda: QUANTUM FIREBALLlct10 10, 9787MB w/418kB Cache, CHS=1247/255/63 Due to the DMA bugs in the MVP3 (586) ATA controller: pugelist:~# hdparm /dev/hda /dev/hda: multcount = 0 (off) I/O support = 3 (32-bit w/sync) unmaskirq = 0 (off) using_dma = 0 (off) keepsettings = 1 (on) nowerr = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 8 (on) geometry = 1247/255/63, sectors = 20044080, start = 0 pugelist:~# hdparm -tT /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 2.87 seconds = 44.60 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 7.99 seconds = 8.01 MB/sec When I had this same disk running on an i810 or a VIA 686 ATA controller, I could get 23+ MB/sec out of it, but since I can't turn on DMA (hdparm -d1), my rates suck. If I only had one of these controllers and a pair of big, fast disks, I could have INCREDIBLE performance and a reason to keep this motherboard in service a while longer. :) While we're talking about it, anybody want to help me tune the disk a little further without having to enable DMA? ;) -- -=|JP|=- Need a good geek? I'm unemployed! '01 B15 SE/PP | http://www.xanga.com/cowboydren/ | />< '95 SL2 Auto | cowboydren @ yahoo . com | _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com