Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 too slow ;)

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:05 am

Hi guys,

I recently upgraded my BP6 boot drive from a Samsung SV1203N (5400rpm, on the HPT366

) to a Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 (15000 rpm, on an Adaptec 29160). Nice thing, so far

I still have a small issue with my setup (already mentioned that here): The maximum transfer rate and even the burst rate seem to be limited to ~60MB/s for the Cheetah 15k.3 (should me >70MB/s according to storagereview.com).

Something seems to slow down the PCI bus. Or maybe the 29160 is running in U2W instead of U160 mode, though the Adaptec BIOS says "160" for the Cheetah on bootup, and I use a quality LVD cable from Amphenol.

Any ideas?

Setup:

BP6, RU BIOS, ACPI enabled, Dual Celeron 366@523, MPS 1.4

AGP - Matrox G400
PCI1 - 3C905B NIC
PCI2 - Realtek 8139D NIC
PCI3 - Lifetec 9415 TV-Card,
PCI 4 - Adaptec 29160
ISA 2 -Soundblaster AWE64

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 9:24 am

Nice! I love SCSI. Too bad they are too expensive and most often too loud.

I got myself a dual Xeon 550MHz Intel setup at work which is SCSI only (10k rpm disk). It is pretty fast and flexible.

I do actually have an idea what could be affecting your speed:

1. I once read, long time ago that in a system that is PCI/ISA based, there are timings to be taken care of between the busses that lowers the efficiency for the PCI bus. I have heard that the PCI bus may loose as much as 10% of its performance.

2. The BP6 is old and may not be as efficient as the systems that Storagereview uses to test the drives.

Under Linux it is possible to build a kernel that does not load support for the ISA bus. That is what I have done on my dual cpu machine at work. I am not sure if it affects point number one above since I haven't done anyt testing but if I am not using the ISA bus then why load drivers/support for it? It would also be fun to see what type of speed you could get out of that drive using Linux...

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 9:38 am

purrkur wrote: Nice! I love SCSI. Too bad they are too expensive and most often too loud.

Yes. But this single platter drive's idle noise is quieter than the Samsung's. Seeks and vibrations would be louder, but I decoupled the drive on a piece of synthetic sponge (like I did on most of my other drives).

And I got the Cheetah for 50 Euros off Ebay. Including shipping

purrkur wrote:
I do actually have an idea what could be affecting your speed:

1. I once read, long time ago that in a system that is PCI/ISA based, there are timings to be taken care of between the busses that lowers the efficiency for the PCI bus. I have heard that the PCI bus may loose as much as 10% of its performance.

2. The BP6 is old and may not be as efficient as the systems that Storagereview uses to test the drives.

Yes, but the BX chipset is known to offer good PCI performance. Even with my underclocked PCI bus (95 Mhz FSB) I should get ~100MB/s.

purrkur wrote:
Under Linux it is possible to build a kernel that does not load support for the ISA bus. That is what I have done on my dual cpu machine at work. I am not sure if it affects point number one above since I haven't done anyt testing but if I am not using the ISA bus then why load drivers/support for it? It would also be fun to see what type of speed you could get out of that drive using Linux...

In fact, one of my reasons to go for the Cheetah was that I read in the storagereview forums that it makes quite a difference under Linux. And I would like to give Linux another shot. Had used Red Hat 9 before, but was too stupid/inexperienced to update it to KDE 3.2 (for more snappiness), even with rpm, apt/synaptic and yum. Should've read more docs, but life is short...

So I think about

a) trying RH9 again (without giving up)
b) Give Gentoo a shot.

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 11:47 am

You could also give Debian a try. That is what I am running on my BP6. They have a new installer out (that is still RC1 but Debian is going to release a new version based on that installer pretty soon. I have used the RC1 version successfully on a few computers without issues. The installer detects your hardware and sets stuff up for you. You also get to do the installation through the network so you only install what you need and ask for. If you upgrade it to "unstable" then you will get KDE 3.3 and so on without problems.

The new installer is still curses based but don't let that fool you. It may be lacking eye candy but it does a good job without being complicated.

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 12:34 pm

I saw the last debian stable release was rather old (older than RH9 that was fine for me so far), and I was told Debian was not exactly for beginners, so I disregarded it.

Hmm... I'll read some info. Sounds interesting.

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 12:45 pm

Currently bwosing through the installer documentation... one question: Does the installer let you create a boot floppy, in case you don't want to install grub to the MBR (like me)? Fedora Core 2 allowed to install grub into the linux root partition, but did not offer me to create a boot floppy. So I couldn't boot after installing it... great

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 4:50 pm

Hi Wolfram,

Sorry for not providing you with more info at once. The Debian distro is actually 3 different distro's, called stable, testing and unstable. Don't let the name "unstable" fool you because while it is pretty much cutting edge, it is not unstable at all!

The stable distro is very old and will soon be replaced by today's testing, where the most action is happening right now. The new installer tool I told you about will install the testing distro which you can then move to unstable if you want to (that is what I am running on my BP6).

I also found out that the installer has reached RC2 stage and I believe it won't change much at all before entering the new stable release. In any case, you can find more info on this installer and where to download it from here.

I recommend you download the netinst CD image which includes the installer and a very basic Linux installation. The rest you pull from the net when you install what you want (and not what everybody else thinks you should have).

Let me know if you need any further help on this...

Dave Rave · Post by **Dave Rave** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 6:03 am

my thoughts ... (i didn't read all of this comprehensively [alcohol] )

scsi is good for putting data on for faster access.
the OS doesn't need it, all that much.
put a hdd on your primary IDE and use your scsi on your secondary (tertiary) controller for data access.
don't boot to your scsi drive.
(Kuun, please skin me and post me in a tree somewhere for [[ wtf does AVS, ah yes ,...]] Predator's to access .!