gauging interest in VAX 6000-530

From: Bill Pechter <pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org>
Date: Mon Oct 25 08:35:11 1999

> > On or about 07:56 PM 10/24/99 -0700, Mike Cheponis was caught in a dark
> > alley speaking these words:
> >
> >
> > You crack on others for stating things without backing up with actual
> > data... where's yours? My wife's box is a Pentium 100 running SCSI3Wide and
> > I did benchmarks (real-world... but don't have them handy) which showed
> > that box stomped a Pentium 166 / IDE. (Mind you, saying the IDE bus is
> > rather an oxymoron, as it's an extension of the ISA bus IIRC... :-)
>
> > The difference? The IDE bus is totally stupid (read: CPU controlled)
> > whereas the SCSI bus is very smart (read: 80Mhz RISC CPU controlled) - the
> > SCSI controller is offloading most of the CPU overhead.
>
> IDE is a particularly insidious bus. The electrical specs are not well-
> defined, and there are a panoply of "modes" PIO Modes 1,2,3,4, UDMA Mode 1
> and Mode 2, etc.
>
> AFAIK, UDMA Mode 2 is actually as fast as UW SCSI II for a single disk drive;
> of course, people use SCSI for multi-spindle applications as well as high
> throughput.
>

Yeah, but try striping a disk across a number of spindles. You need
either SCSI or a Smart RAID type IDE controller.

> But their machines are obsolete, and that's why we're discussing them here.
>

Obsolete is in the mind of the MIS director, not the techies.


>
Bill
---
  bpechter_at_shell.monmouth.com|pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org
      Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC,
      The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.
Received on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 08:35:11 BST

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