Best swap cylinders?

Mike Bilow mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net
Fri Oct 24 12:13:00 EDT 1997



Rodney Thayer wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 RT> with a contemporary motherboard, why not buy a cheapo second
 RT> IDE drive and make it the second unit?

There is no advantage to this.  Unlike SCSI, the system is totally hosed when
doing operations involving an IDE device.  As a result, the two IDE devices
will simply alternate CPU usage.

The world runs Windows 95, where the operating system cannot make use of the
free time even if the hardware provides it, so IDE incurs no penalty.  For
Linux, NT, OS/2, or any other competent operating system, a far better and
cheaper route to increased performance is to use SCSI.  One decent SCSI drive
will outperform two cheap IDE drives.
 
-- Mike





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