On 4/24/05, Pieter Hulshoff wrote:

Hello all,

When I create a lot of disk activity (copying files for example), my CPU appears to be spending a lot of time 'waiting' i.s.o. being 'idle'. I'm using software RAID-0 configurations for my disks (for the moment). Is it normal that it spends this much time waiting? Is this a result of my use of software RAID? Would it be different with hardware RAID?

Regards,

Pieter

Disk seeks take milliseconds to complete, so your bottleneck is definately expected to be the disk drive, not the CPU. Are you complaining because you expect the CPU to be idle as the disk head seeks around the drive instead of 'waiting'? In theory a SCSI drive will spend less time waiting than a IDE drive due to the intellegence of the drive itself, but I'm not sure if that is observable as decreased 'waiting' time. If your goal is to be able to use the CPU during the seek period, then IDE drives may not be your best choice. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century