[plug] [OT] gigabyte

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 08:01 +0800, Bernd Felsche wrote:

> >but the raid seems to be bad (cant upgrade the ite bios, and speed
> >is poor 46 ->54)
> 
> What figures are those? Units? Megabytes/second? Doing what?
> 
> Throughput isn't "brilliant" but then there are only IDE drives
> after all. Throughput is no worse than single drive, AFAICT.

Good seek time is crucial for pretty much anything except highly linear
work (video editing, disk image server, etc). The degradation of
performance under multiple linear and/or random read/write loads is
probably even more critical in general purpose servers, less so for
desktops.

In comparison, I personally view throughput as rather unimportant. It
does help a LOT with image-based backups, but day-to-day performance
seems to be mostly about seek times and multiple random I/O.
Unfortunately, I'm currently stuck with a RAID setup with acceptable
throughput, good seek times, and utterly apalling ability to hold up to
multiple random I/O loads - it "feels" very slow.

--
Craig Ringer