[lug] hard drive speeds

[Rob Riggs]

"Michael J. Hammel" wrote:
> 
> Question to you hardware experts:  what are the fastest hard drives
> available?  Don't SCSI drives generally have faster throughput and
> read/write times than IDE?
> 
> I'm working on a talk I'll be giving at ALS on the Gimp and one of the
> major bottlenecks for graphic artists when using the Gimp is swapping tiles
> from memory to disk and back.  My understanding is that the faster buses
> being introduced in PCs these days aren't helping IDE throughput, but they
> might help SCSI subsystems using add-on cards, right?
> 
> Anyone want to take a crack at what drives are generally going to provide
> the fastest throughput?

Ultra2 SCSI - 10K RPM. But don't stop there. Get two or three of them
and use the kernel's built in RAID support and make a RAID-0 stripe
set. This is by far the best performance option. If you want to do more
than 3 drives you'll want to get a multi-channel SCSI controller to
keep SCSI bus contention at a minimum.

If you've got the cash to do RAID0 Ultra2 SCSI, you might do better to
use that money for more RAM and eliminate the swapping altogether. (Or
swap to a RAM disk...)

-- 
Rob Riggs
Technical Staff
Tummy.com, Ltd.
http://www.tummy.com/