Re: [Pan-users] Speed of pan

[John J. LeMay Jr.]

** Reply to message from Ronald KA4INM Youvan <address@hidden> on Sun,
06 Oct 2002 00:23:45 -0400


>    Also important is that your mommy board's IDE controller's chip set's
> driver is in your operating kernel, so your drives are operating in the
> highest DMA mode the drive/s use.
> (because you controller chips are younger than your distro. - non Intel only)

I'll pipe in here since I just replaced my machine with a new one. Went from a
P3-600 to a P4-1.7 (needed a new testbed machine and I couldn't see having a
1.7 in the bed while I'm still using a 600, right? ;) )

Anyhow, the new machine has an ATA-100 capable, 7200 RPM disk and an Intel 845
based board in it. Linux support for the 845 is currently very weak, especially
in the video (640x480 only with the latest XFree86 release) and IDE controller
support. hdparm was reporting throughput of 4 MB/s with the onboard ATA
controller. I put in a Promise ATA100 controller (Highpoint would have worked
just as well I'm sure) and moved the disk to the new controller. hdparm now
reports around 40 MB/s. Not exactly the 100 MB/s ATA100 is supposedly capable
of, but a lot better than 4 MB/s. 

Pan starts here now in just about 1 second from click to the gui being up. On
the older machine (ATA-66 and a 5400RPM disk) the startup time was closer to 5
seconds. Startup times for other "piggy" apps like Mozilla and OpenOffice are
even more noticable.

-- 
John LeMay
Senior Enterprise Consultant
NJMC | http://www.njmc.com | Phone 732-785-2525
Specializing in Microsoft and Unix based solutions