SCSI for a slimmer World hack
Back a few weeks during the IDE vs. SCSI and hacking for a slimmer World threads I was experimenting with SCSI in my G4 MDD DP. I had found using Disk Speed Bench X that one of my IDE drives was faster so I made that one the start up drive. I then got a used U320 15k RPM SCSI drive set up as an alternative start up drive and cloned the original start up drive onto it. The computer definitely feels faster when booted from the SCSI disk, which belies the results Disk Speed Bench X provided. So I decided to install Xbench and do a more comprehensive comparison test. The results show a definite advantage from running a SCSI drive. More than double the speed for read and write throughput compared to the IDE drive. The memory test was a smidge faster under the SCSI boot but as well but I don't know if that is just statistical anomaly or real. Disk Speed Bench X reported the following this morning: ATA 100 drive mounted as /Volumes/MDD HD1 77 MB/sec SCSI drive mounted as / 76MB/sec No difference between IDE and SCSI speeds according to this test. Xbench results when the MDD was booted from the faster ATA100 drive: Memory Test37.05 System34.46 Allocate94.16345.79 Kalloc/sec Fill41.242005.23 MB/sec Copy19.16395.79 MB/sec Stream40.06 Copy42.44876.52 MB/sec [altivec] Scale44.32915.64 MB/sec [altivec] Add37.79804.99 MB/sec [altivec] Triad36.68784.61 MB/sec [altivec] Quartz Graphics Test71.52 Line59.543.96 Klines/sec [50% alpha] Rectangle60.7018.12 Krects/sec [50% alpha] Circle60.334.92 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha] Bezier65.671.66 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha] Text206.7112.93 Kchars/sec OpenGL Graphics Test74.34 Spinning Squares74.3494.30 frames/sec User Interface Test70.30 Elements70.30322.63 refresh/sec Disk Test35.85 Sequential42.27 Uncached Write28.1317.27 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write38.7021.90 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read63.5118.59 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read57.1728.73 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random31.12 Uncached Write12.931.37 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write61.0119.53 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read88.750.63 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read42.477.88 MB/sec [256K blocks] Xbench results when the MDD was booted from the SCSI drive running on a UL3D card: Memory Test40.85 System40.53 Allocate111.12408.06 Kalloc/sec Fill50.222441.64 MB/sec Copy22.17457.83 MB/sec Stream41.17 Copy43.56899.73 MB/sec [altivec] Scale44.59921.31 MB/sec [altivec] Add40.17855.80 MB/sec [altivec] Triad37.20795.85 MB/sec [altivec] Quartz Graphics Test68.00 Line61.294.08 Klines/sec [50% alpha] Rectangle63.4718.95 Krects/sec [50% alpha] Circle63.545.18 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha] Bezier71.871.81 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha] Text84.685.30 Kchars/sec OpenGL Graphics Test75.49 Spinning Squares75.4995.77 frames/sec User Interface Test70.57 Elements70.57323.86 refresh/sec Disk Test89.00 Sequential105.76 Uncached Write107.1865.81 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write130.1973.66 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read71.1920.83 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read147.8574.31 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random76.82 Uncached Write30.123.19 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write123.6039.57 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read186.951.32 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read184.2834.19 MB/sec [256K blocks] I'll be sticking with the SCSI boot drive. I might even get a custom cable kit so I can put another one in that front drive bay, as long as a cable is wrapping over there anyway. Bruce -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
Re: SCSI for a slimmer World hack
On Dec 9, 2011, at 8:37 AM, Bruce Godfrey wrote: Disk Speed Bench X reported the following this morning: ATA 100 drive mounted as /Volumes/MDD HD1 77 MB/sec SCSI drive mounted as / 76MB/sec No difference between IDE and SCSI speeds according to this test. This means your disk I/O is not what's constraining your system. A faster disk did not increase your actual trabsfer rates, so it's a bus limit, not a disk IO limit. Xbench results when the MDD was booted from the faster ATA100 drive: Memory Test37.05 System34.46 Allocate 94.16345.79 Kalloc/sec Xbench results when the MDD was booted from the SCSI drive running on a UL3D card: Memory Test40.85 System40.53 Allocate 111.12408.06 Kalloc/sec What this mainly means is that XBench is significantly non-precise, that it is designed for systems much faster than the MDD you tested it on, or that your system is seriously memory-bound. Disk speed should have no bearing whatsoever on memory or system test values, as these tests shouldn't be touching the disks at all. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
Re: Strange fan issue with G5 + Leopard
On Dec 10, 2011, at 1:19 PM, g3-5-list@googlegroups.com wrote: HD drives; could it be the HDs are creating more heat, hence the fans spin up? Just one more thing. What is strange is that the temperature rises and the fans speed up, but after a restart the problem goes away for a week or more. ??? If it were a problem of an internal component heating up, why would it be intermittent and correct itself after a restart. -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
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Firefox has recently started to render certain fonts as overlapping unrecognizable garbled knots. Making them look like a mathematical formula in some other language on my eMac. Viewing the same page in Safari renders what looks like Arial or Helvetica headlines. Neither Font book or Font Agent Pro show a problem with any of my fonts. Does anybody have a suggestion as to how to remedy this problem? Don Wakefield DTPetc! (DeskTop Productions et cetera!) Ballwin, Missouri, USA -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
Re: 68 pin vs. 50 pin SCSI HD?
On Dec 10, 2011, at 7:54 PM, Barry Levine wrote: Hi One of the 8GB SCSI HD's on my 8600 G3 is failing. Checking around eBay, I see 68 pin SCSI HD's for sale; and one can purchase an adapter to go to the mac 50 pin cable. I also noticed that there are many larger size 68 pin scsi HD's around than the 50 pin - are these 68 pin drives a bit more recent than the 50 pin ones, and are they usable in my mac with the adapter? thanks Barry 68 pin is wide scsi. 16 bit data path vs the 50 pin's 8 bit. Drives might be slightly newer, but check the individual drives. You may also want to look onto 80 pin SCA scsi. These are server drives and the sca adapters are also easy to get.. Generally more robust than the 50 and 68 pin drives. Also hotter, larger capacity , noisier and faster than most 68 and 50. Depending upon how much storage you need, the 73Gb SCA drives seem to be the sweet spot. 10k rpm drives are starting at $20 shipped. You can ignore the tray that is included with many. That is what they used to install them in the server. Just remove the 4 screws and mount it in your Mac. The one thing to be careful of is formatting. Many SCSI drives are not included in Apple's Drive SetUp program. There are hacks to get it to recognize non-supported drives. Or a 3rd party drive utility like LaCies will format most any SCSI drive. Len -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
Re: SCSI for a slimmer World hack
Comments interspersed below - Bruce Johnson wrote: On Dec 9, 2011, at 8:37 AM, Bruce Godfrey wrote: Disk Speed Bench X reported the following this morning: ATA 100 drive mounted as /Volumes/MDD HD1 77 MB/sec SCSI drive mounted as / 76MB/sec No difference between IDE and SCSI speeds according to this test. This means your disk I/O is not what's constraining your system. A faster disk did not increase your actual trabsfer rates, so it's a bus limit, not a disk IO limit. Do you know something about the differences in the way Xbench and Disk Speed Bench X actually run their tests? I can believe that the bus might be limiting transfers to about 75MB/sec. Given that, a disk that can actually put data down that fast will make for a better performing system than one that puts down a lot less than that. I see in the comparison (DSB to XB) that DSB shows both disks running at about 76MB/sec. XB gets about this same number for the SCSI disk in the uncached write and uncached read tests, but gets less for the IDE disk in those tests. So there is some consistency in the measurements there. And what look like real differences. If you look over the comprehensive drive tests and reviews, for instance on Storagereview.com, you find lots of cases where the specs and the real world performance do not match up exactly. Sometimes the biggest differences come from the tests which are designed to be most like running desktop applications. Xbench results when the MDD was booted from the faster ATA100 drive: Memory Test37.05 System34.46 Allocate 94.16345.79 Kalloc/sec Xbench results when the MDD was booted from the SCSI drive running on a UL3D card: Memory Test40.85 System40.53 Allocate 111.12408.06 Kalloc/sec What this mainly means is that XBench is significantly non-precise, that it is designed for systems much faster than the MDD you tested it on, or that your system is seriously memory-bound. Disk speed should have no bearing whatsoever on memory or system test values, as these tests shouldn't be touching the disks at all. I don't know what to make of the memory test results either. If you are writing and reading data into and out of RAM for the test, where does that data come from? The system has the full 2GB RAM that it can hold so it shouldn't be memory bound. Bruce -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
Re: 68 pin vs. 50 pin SCSI HD?
Thanks, good info. Barry On Dec 10, 2011, at 7:54 PM, Barry Levine wrote: Hi One of the 8GB SCSI HD's on my 8600 G3 is failing. Checking around eBay, I see 68 pin SCSI HD's for sale; and one can purchase an adapter to go to the mac 50 pin cable. I also noticed that there are many larger size 68 pin scsi HD's around than the 50 pin - are these 68 pin drives a bit more recent than the 50 pin ones, and are they usable in my mac with the adapter? thanks Barry 68 pin is wide scsi. 16 bit data path vs the 50 pin's 8 bit. Drives might be slightly newer, but check the individual drives. You may also want to look onto 80 pin SCA scsi. These are server drives and the sca adapters are also easy to get.. Generally more robust than the 50 and 68 pin drives. Also hotter, larger capacity , noisier and faster than most 68 and 50. Depending upon how much storage you need, the 73Gb SCA drives seem to be the sweet spot. 10k rpm drives are starting at $20 shipped. You can ignore the tray that is included with many. That is what they used to install them in the server. Just remove the 4 screws and mount it in your Mac. The one thing to be careful of is formatting. Many SCSI drives are not included in Apple's Drive SetUp program. There are hacks to get it to recognize non-supported drives. Or a 3rd party drive utility like LaCies will format most any SCSI drive. Len -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
Re: 68 pin vs. 50 pin SCSI HD?
All SCSI-II and SCSI-III wide drives are supposed to be backward compatible, but may require a jumper to be set differently. I have several adapters that convert the 80pin SCA drives to be able to use both the 50pin, or 68pin cables. With SCSI, the slowest drive, or device on the chain (cable) determines the maximum speed that the chain can run at, so if you have slower SCSI-II, or SCSI-III wide drives on a cable that also has a SCSI-I 50pin device, the faster device will be slowed down to the max. speed of the slower device. I have an over-clocked Amiga A4000 that can no longer use it's SCSI controller, because of timing issues. But I have another RAM expansion board that has a fast SCSI-II controller that I can use instead of the SCSI controller on the Amiga accelerator, so I am happier to keep the accelerator over-clocked at 60% faster operation and give up the accelerator's built-in SCSI controller. SCSI has much less CPU overhead than IDE, which can make direct speed comparisons misleading, as all good operating systems are now Multi- tasking, Multi-threaded, so when copying large files, or loading them to RAM to run while also doing other things on your computer, using a SCSI drive will allow a great deal more CPU resources for the other tasks, where an IDE drive will not. As most computers are far more powerful today than is needed for most software, this is not an issue often. Back in the days of 30MHz CPU's instead of 3.0GHz CPU's with multiple cores, using a SCSI drive could make more of a difference. At least on an Amiga, which was one of the first popular home computers that pioneered Multi-tasking. I remember impressing Windows users by formatting up to 4 floppy disks at the same time while playing a 4 voice music mod and using a high color paint program all at the same time on a 7MHz computer that reacted faster than their 286 systems running at 16MHz or 20MHz. Ahhh, the good old days! SCSI was a great interface in it's day. On Dec 10, 2011, at 4:54 PM, Barry Levine wrote: Hi One of the 8GB SCSI HD's on my 8600 G3 is failing. Checking around eBay, I see 68 pin SCSI HD's for sale; and one can purchase an adapter to go to the mac 50 pin cable. I also noticed that there are many larger size 68 pin scsi HD's around than the 50 pin - are these 68 pin drives a bit more recent than the 50 pin ones, and are they usable in my mac with the adapter? thanks Barry -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
Re: 68 pin vs. 50 pin SCSI HD?
SCSI was a great interface in it's day. SCSI over fiber and other serial channel transport means are still in wide use. -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
