IDE vs SCSI drives

[Jason]

Kevin Buettner wrote:
> The bonnie documentation at
> 
>     http://www.textuality.com/bonnie/advice.html
> 
> suggests that the file size be four times the size of your memory.
> This turned out to be impossible to do, however, since the test
> machine has 1GB or memory and because it's an x86 box which limits us
> to 2GB files.  The ``bonnie'' docs suggest using a value of 2047 MB in
> this case.  So that's what I did, even though this value is slightly
> less than twice the memory size on this machine.  I have a number of
> applications running though and ``free'' reports 739696 KB of memory
> free after discounting the space used for the disk buffer cache.

Yanking half the memory isnt something I would expect to effect what
you are trying to measure - except to make the test results MORE
valid, although it does require a pair of reboots (assuming you put it
back in). Odds are that gig is on more than one stick :-)

On another note, why exactly is it that a 32bit system limits one to
2GB files, rather than 4GB files? Whos bright idea was it to use a
signed integer rather than an unsigned one to point to a location in a
file, anyways?

-- 
jkenner @ mindspring . com__
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