[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 @ 21:48 -0500, Lionel Peterson said:

> I built up a few machines for home, all based on the Intel D101GGC
> motherboard, dualcore Intel 805 CPU (2x 2.66 GHz CPU, each with 1 Meg
> cache), and 1 Gig RAM (desktops to run WinXP, Vista Beta, and UBUNTU
> desktop), and ontly the one machine with SATA drives has decent
> performance - the two with IDE drives inhale *deeply*. To prove my
> theory, I swaped out the PATA drives in one machine for a SATA drive,
> and it ran as expected.

Sans the right driver, most ATA controller's perform horribly in
compatibility mode.  That sounds like what is happening here.

On my current AMD64 desktop, using the generic ATA code makes the drives
run at about 25% normal speed.  Install the VIA driver in either Windows
or Linux and they run very fast.

> With the IDE drives, it took MINUTES to boot WinXP. Minutes. Changing
> widows was really painful - it reminded me of the 80486 machine I
> bought years ago that had the clock set at 4.77 MHz, not 33 MHz...
> Wow, that was slow...

Windows sucks, but XP loads faster than 2000, and I can load a fully
bloated (lot's of goodies) version of Win2k on an ATA drive in under 2
minutes.  That includes the time my SCSI controller takes to fire up
(which is not used by Windows).

This sounds like something is bad wrong.

> x86 hardware IS fun!

The problems above aren't caused by X86 (PC actually) hardware.



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shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak
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