Re: incredibly poor SCSI performance - why ?

From: Ricky Beam (jfbeam@bluetopia.net)
Date: Wed Apr 05 2000 - 12:09:47 EST


On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
>I have 3 of the IBM 18GB speedstars as well, I should try them

Mine are UltraStars, but whatever...

>out. But I wasn't aware (unbelievably) of the existence of an internal
>transfer rate. Now I know better.

So, where did you think the bits came from? You do know there's sector
heading, ECC, and padding in addition to "user data" on a disk?

>>Taged commands are off, there's a speed killer.
>
>Yes, I have some devices that don't like them, and I've never
>reenabled them individually for the disks. I should try this.

Gez, that's a simple edit of aic7xxx.c

>>> 10: 1740 1756 IO-APIC-level aic7xxx, RME Digi9652
>>
>>And you're sharing an interrupt. That'll burn a little speed.
>
>Yes, I know, its not very nice, and I still haven't found a way to
>force it to be otherwise. The AMI BIOS doesn't seem to play along with
>my attempt to assign different priorities to the slots.

It's not a major problem, but it does cost a few cycles.

>>Umm, I don't think so... 80MB/s is an LVD speed. You cannot have both LVD
>>and non-LVD hardware on the same cable in LVD mode. There doesn't appear to
>>be any isolation chip on that MB (and SuperMicro doesn't list one) so it's
>>actually _40_MB/s but that doesn't matter for the purposes here -- the bus
>>is faster than the drive. Besides, you've got too many devices to fit on a
>>proper SE FAST-40 (U2/SE) bus. Again, this is immaterial to speed.
>
>There are 3 SCSI connectors on the motherboard, one U2/LVD-SE, one
>regular old wide SCSI and one Ultra SCSI. The disks are the only
>things connected to the U2/LVD-SE connector. I got the impression from
>the adaptec site that if I set things up this way, I got an isolated
>U2/LVD bus. Is this not true ?

As I said, Supermicro doesn't say there's an isolator. And it doesn't
really matter.

--Ricky

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 07 2000 - 21:00:14 EST