>>Yeah but did you see the list of equipment on the server? Not too great. If I remember, a 75Mhz Pentioum with 16 megs of RAM, 800 Meg HD, etc. I could not get past this part. They are using (no pun inteded) old technology on what may be a decent sized Database.
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>>Tom
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>Guys, speaking from experience, an 800MB (IDE, I presume) drive has 16ms access time. Even a 1.6MB IDE has only 10ms access at best vs. a SCSI drive of any decent size sporting 8ms access time and 40mbps throughput. If these queries are being built on local drive tempfiles on a BNC 10base T network, I can assure you that Win95 or Netware 4.1 will bog down with this system. The processor speed and memory contributes somewhat to this problem but beefing up this dinosaur to 32 meg will only give her modest improvement in performance.
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>But then I guess you guys were saying that in a lot fewer words.(s)


Bill

Access time is the small part. The burst transfer rate on those older drives is much smaller then the newer ones.

WD 850 == 12 MB transfer @ 4500 RMM
WD 1600 == 16 MB Transfer @ 5400 RPM

So your looking at a 30% throughput increase. And that is just in the drive transfer. There is much more that comes into play.

I also find memory a very big plus, not a small plus because it prevents disk swapping.

HTH,
Tom