dual pentia/SCSI & Linux

[Kevin Buettner]

On Sep 11,  9:23pm, John (EBo) David wrote:

> > I thinking of buying a dual pentium 3 500 w/SCSI drive.  When things settle
> > down a bit (I just barely managed to pull myself away from CNN to type this
> > message) could someone tell about their experience with Linux on a dual
> > pentium w/SCSI?  Will my experience with this type of system be any
> > different that a single pentium 3 and an IDE drive?  Any precautions I
> > should take or questions I should ask?  Is this purely a Windows machine, or
> > will Linux be no prob?
> 
> that is basically the clone of the machine I use all the time
> (Linux/NT/W2000).  There is some wierd things with getting the CD-RW
> working, but I think the rewer kernals take care of most of the gotcha's
> 
> Typically, SCSI will run faster and easier than IDE.  IDE's you
> typically only get two devices/channel, while on scsi you get 7 on the
> old and 15 on the newer SCSI busses.  You want to make sure that the
> bios will support your SCSI's though (there was an oddity with mine, but
> it was immediately solved with a patch to the bios).

I have a dual 550MHz PIII system w/ SCSI.  It *used* to have a SCSI
drive in it.

A short history is as follows:  I purchased the box with an 18GB
7200RPM SCSI drive.  Later, I added two cheap 5400RPM 45GB IDE drives
and a Promise Ultra-66 IDE controller which I put into a (software)
RAID-1 configuration.  Benchmarking the SCSI drive and the IDE drives
showed that the SCSI drive was *substantially* slower (even with the
overhead of software RAID-1 for the IDE drives).  Earlier this summer,
one of the IDE drives failed.  (I didn't lose anything because this
drive was mirrored.)  While diagnosing the problem, I noticed that the
SCSI drive was making an aweful whining noise when it first started
up, so I decided to replace all of the drives in the box with two 60GB
IBM DeskStars.  (It was making me nervous to have my home directories
on an unmirrored drive.) The IBM DeskStars are IDE drives and so far
they're performing fine.  I feel much better knowing that all of the
partitions on this machine are now mirrored.

Anyway...  As noted above, my benchmarks showed that a cheap,
supposedly less capable IDE drive was faster than the SCSI drive.  I
think there are still applications where SCSI is king, but it costs a
lot and I just can't see spending the extra money when you only plan
to have one or two drives in the box.

The original poster (Eric) may want to (re)read some of my past posts
regarding performance of SCSI vs IDE:

http://lists.plug.phoenix.az.us/pipermail/plug-discuss/2000-October/006665.html
http://lists.plug.phoenix.az.us/pipermail/plug-discuss/2000-October/006718.html
http://lists.plug.phoenix.az.us/pipermail/plug-discuss/2001-March/010647.html

Kevin