🚀 go-pugleaf

William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> writes:

> Obviously, you don't do much harddisk trashing.  For CPU consideration
> only, dual can run 2 processes, so it's more responsive, both in theory
> and in practice.  If you are doing lots of IDE I/O, then your computer
> will crawl no matter what.  So, it makes more sense to go with
> single-CPU and spend some money on SCSI.

I doubt that SCSI interface will improve I/O performance by itself on a
desktop system with one or two harddisk compared to IDE with DMA/66 or
DMA/100. At least, I haven't seen any significant difference. To
archieve good I/O performance, the physical characteristics of HDDs are
much more important. Although there are high performance SCSI drives
easily outperforming any IDE drive available, their price is about 5-10
times as high as the price of a good IDE drive (even a comparable SCSI
drive costs about 3 times as much), and they produce much heat and a
horrible noise, so it doesn't seem to me to be a reasonable investition
for a desktop system unless such performance is really needed and you
can leave with those disadvantages (and can afford it).

Unfortunately there is no "best" harddisk:

    HDD         | performance  | noise        | price
----------------+--------------+--------------+-----------
"Silent" IDE[1] | intermediate | low          | low
high end IDE    | good         | intermediate | low
low end SCSI    | good         | high         | high
high end SCSI   | excellent    | unbearable   | very high

[1] e.g. new Seagate 5400 rpm drives

> Also, dual-motherboard is hard to come by and is expensive.  The usual
> argument that you only have to have one RAM, one case/power supply, one
> video/network card, etc is valid.  So, the OP has to do his own
> math...

A dual motherboard is still significantly less expensive than a high
end SCSI system. But I think that neither a dual motherboard nor
SCSI will give much performance gain on a typical desktop system. It
depends on the applications.

-- 
\  /                                       vlad@hashbang.de
 \/lad                                     http://www.hashbang.de