If you feel this is off topic, flame me ;) I thought some of you might think this interesting.
I recently took the time to test the read/write speed of a Maxtor 7200 RPM IDE drive connected to a dual-channel Sonnet ATA100 PCI card. I needed to see if I had to invest in Ultra160 drives for our Media 100 video editing suites. Version 8 of Media 100 will _only_ run on OS X. Once I had all the pieces together, it didn't take much more time to try a few different machines. I was able to track down a OS X tool to test the performance of the ATA drive/controller combination (DiskBanger, from Apple's CHUD suite of performance testing tools). I put the same boot drive, the same PCI card, and the same data drive in several different machines. The results: 350 MHz G4 (PCI graphics) - 64 MB/sec minimum, 126 MB/sec maximum 300 MHz G3 (Blue & White) - 45 MB/sec minimum, 70 MB/sec maximum 233 MHz G3 (beige desktop) - 36 MB/sec minimum, 47 MB/sec maximum 400 MHz G3 (in 9600) - 17 MB/sec minimum, 24 MB/sec maximum A 10,000 RPM Ultra SCSI drive on a ATTO card tested at 32 MB/sec in the 9600. A drive connected to the internal SCSI bus only managed 7 MB/sec in the 9600. As you can see, even though the G3 upgrade card in the 9600 waas running at a faster MHz than the other G3 systems, the performance was the poorest. Not particularly surprising considering the different motherboard/memory speeds, but I did not expect a 5X difference to the G4. I did not test any faster G4 systems, I thought 126 MB/sec was about as fast as the ATA100 card would go. Too bad I didn't have a ATA133 ;) I also tested a RAID configuration (Apple Disk Utility) using both channels of the card and two identical Maxtor drives. There was a difference, but only 1-2 MB/sec faster, not worth it in my mind. The Mirror option only dropped about 1 MB/sec of performance on the G4, I didn't test that option on all machines. This was not a rigorous, scientific test, but it was enough to tell me that I think we can use ATA instead of SCSI for our edit suites, and that I really need to get rid of my 9600. -- Charles Dostale System Administrator Silver Oaks Communications http://www.silveroaks.com 824 17th Street Moline IL USA 61265 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 309-797-9898 -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
