>>>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.
>>>
>>>But then I guess you guys were saying that in a lot fewer words.(s)
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>>
>>Bill
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>>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
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>>So your looking at a 30% throughput increase. And that is just in the drive transfer. There is much more that comes into play.
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>>I also find memory a very big plus, not a small plus because it prevents disk swapping.
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>>HTH,
>>Tom
>
>Tom,
>
>I guess we are saying the same thing but coming from different angles. The difference between SCSI server tech. vs. IDE tech boils down to the difference in throughput. As far as memory is concerned, I don't know that I would disagree with your analysis as it certainly applies to a Win95 workstation's speeds when any amount of multitasking is being performed. However in an actual application, I upgraded an IDE server from 16 MB to 48MB of memory and had very little change in throughput when more than 4 (yes I mean 4) workstations got into any simultaneous data moving activity between the server and the client. However, when I changed out the disk drives to SCSI, it was like opening a highway from 2 lanes to 6 lanes. No problem. The one thing I didn't do was try the new drives with only 16MB on the server. (I guess I my penchant for research was overcome with my desire to "move on") so memory may be just as important.
>
>Appreciate your insight.
Bill
We ain't picky! Naw! (s)
One thing I have noticed is just standard performane in memory upgrades. Everyone I have talked to has seen a big difference & develops with 24 to 32 Megs or more of memory (32+). None of the people I chat with have 16 Megs or less of RAM, the speed is that different. I could possibley see where speed is not noticed with SCSI when RAM is increased because of throughput. A large number of people I know use EIDE because SCSI is just too outrageous ($). For the pice of a 2 Gig SCSI they can get between 4 & 6 Gigs of EIDE.
Of course other 'normal' optimizations are assumed. I totally agree, get respectable speed & move on. Too much to do to get too technical.
I see some VERY good benifets with PCI LAN adapters and some other performance boost with a 512k pipeline burst cache (intead of 256k). The cache is really quite economical too.
HTH,
Tom
