[TriLUG] IDE Drive/Channel Config

Mark Shuford davemarcus at pobox.com
Thu Apr 17 14:15:37 EDT 2003


The way I'd always looked at it, since only one IDE device can be active _per channel_ at one time, the source and target would be best on separate channels if they are to be copying device to device. That way one can read while the other writes with out waiting on each other to use the channel.

But you've got more than two devices going. Just about any useful system does.

And the IDE channel will be slowed to the slowest device. So this argues against the separate channel plan since it adversely affects faster devices.

It's IDE; there's no real way to win.

As I saw suggested: play with it and see what works (and works best) for your usage patterns.

On IDE systems I used to routinely keep my program and data partitions on a separate device and channel from the drive holding my swap and 'Net cache files. I got quite noticeably better results on both my WindBloze and LINUX boxes. (A feeling was around three to four times better performance for most of my work.) With more complicated setups involving two HDDs, a CD reader, and a CD writer I'm trying to stop worry about it to preserve my sanity.

We used to spend lots of time spreading databases across multiple spindles (hard drives) based on concurrent access needs -- I think we had about 18 spindles at one point for a not all that big but heavily accessed (r/w) database. With the right IO architecture this is wonderfully effective. With IDE it's rather a wash-up. Unless you get special controllers you've a got a nifty total of four spindles.

I've got somewhat of a problem with the move to gargantuan drives which encourage you to keep everything at one place. I'd like to have a couple of small, fast as Hell drives around for swap and cache. Again this doesn't work well with IDEs. I guess I need to look at RAM disk and non-physical cache-ing.

Yeah caching and RAID help. But they help more if they're starting with something that works well to begin with... SCSI.

Keep beating on it -- you'll get something that works well enough to keep you off the Xanax.

OH YEAH -- There are hardware only CD copying systems for around $250.00 out there. If this fits what you're doing (or the majority of what you're doing) there are surely advantages there.


Prosit,
-- 
Mark Shuford

Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
					--Bob Edwards

Visit me at: http://www.krazeemark.com



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