RE: Tuning Linux for high-speed disk subsystems

["Dieter Nützel" <Dieter.Nuetzel@hamburg.de>]

The heroinewarrior.com (Broadcast 2000) guys came to the following with the
Tyan Thunder K7 (2 x 1.0 GHz Athlon MP) dual channel U160 (Adaptec) and
RAID 0. http://heroinewarrior.com/athlon.php3

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 As for performance our experiences are biased because this system is almost 
exclusively used for video software development not games like most. It needs 
a reliable operating system like Linux and very fast media storage drives.

 The inverse telecine, a grueling memory excercise which takes 3 hours on a 
dual PIII 933 and 2 hours on a dual Alpha, takes about 2 hours on the dual 
Athlon. 

Our 100 Gig SCSI raid, consisting of 6 15,000 rpm drives on the motherboard's 
two SCSI 160 channels gives a full 110MB/sec read and write with RAID 0. With 
RAID chunks set to 1MB the write accesses go to 160MB/sec and read accesses 
go to 90MB/sec sustained. This system would make a good motion capture tool. 
Previous Intel attempts at onboard disk I/O would give 50MB/sec.
[-]

-Dieter