[SunRescue] Best prices on SS20/Ultra compatible RAM... and s ome disk pointer s/finds

[Gregory Leblanc]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Mosiejczuk [mailto:kurt at csh.rit.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2000 10:00 AM
> To: 'rescue at sunhelp.org'
> Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Best prices on SS20/Ultra compatible 
> RAM... and
> s ome disk pointer s/finds
> 
> On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> 
> > I thought that Bill had said that the half height drives 
> would just barely
> > fit into an Ultra.  I don't have one, so who knows.  I don't use any
> > diskspace on my SPARC workstations, everything runs from my 
> SS2 with a nice
> > pair of 9GB full height SCSI drives, and dual internal 4 
> gigers.  Besides,
> > ethernet is faster then disk when running S/linux.  :-/
> 
> Uh, I know that's true for linux/sun3(x), but I believe that is NOT 
> true of Sparc Linux.  At least, I haven't noticed it, and I've been
> running Sparc Linux and Solaris for a while.

I can post some benchmarks that I did on my SS20.  The machine is a dual
SM41, 128MB of ram, 4GB IBM SCSI SCA drive.  Running Solaris, from the
console login, I ran tiobench (it's a multi-threaded benchmarking program).
With a data size of 768MB, it was able to read and write about 7MB/sec to
that disk.  From Linux, on the SAME disk, at the console, it was able to
write about 3MB/sec.  Mind you, that's still quite a bit faster than
ethernet, but it's still pretty darn awful, compared to Solaris.  On a 3
disk RAID 0, Linux got the same read speed, so it's a problem with the ESP
SCSI driver on linux, and not something with the drive.  If I could get a
100Mbit ethernet card for my SPARCs, I suspect that it would be faster than
the disk.
	Grego

P.S.  careful about using SPARC/linux, SPARC international may come after
you for (ab)using their registered trademark.