[geeks] The ol' trusty G4...

[Mark]

On 11 Sep 2007, at 03:49, Nate wrote:

>> I've gotten a bootab;e SATA card for my DA 466 MHz G4 (but not yet
>> upgraded) - did it make a big difference (from IDE -> SATA) for
>> user experience?
>
> Subjectively and objectively, it does make a difference.  Using a
> SATA card also gets around that annoying 48-bit LBA issue with PATA,
> so you're no longer capped at 128GB volume sizes.  Here are some
> benchmarks with the Raptor, mostly full, so this is mostly inner
> (slower) tracks:
>
> Sequential
> Uncached Write 72.68 MB/sec [4K blocks]
> Uncached Write 72.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
> Uncached Read  25.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
> Uncached Read  68.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
> Random
> Uncached Write  1.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
> Uncached Write 46.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
> Uncached Read   0.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
> Uncached Read  31.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Using SATA doesn't give huge raw speed benefits (unless, as in this  
case, you are using a 10k drive) for single drive operation. The  
beauty of SATA is that it vastly reduces the number of polling  
interrupts used to the CPU during disk access. This gives more SCSI- 
like disk performance allowing minimum interference with running  
processes when transferring large volumes of data. It makes a huge  
difference in games, and in Apps that shunt large volumes of file  
data, such as Aperture.

Nate, I'm interested where you got your FirmTek card. I'm looking for  
one for my B&W G3 (it uses standard 64-bit PCI slots, same as the  
G4s, which I think the Firmtek works with?). I'm ideally looking for  
a 1V4 64-bit card with internal headers. If I can find one I'm going  
to use my old B&W (768MB RAM and a G4/500) as a NAS box as it's much  
more power efficient than the current NAS server I have (P4/2.8).  
Trouble is I can't find a UK vendor for the damn things *anywhere*.

-- 
Mark Benson

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