[Tfug] Questions on unusual hard disks - AV, SSD

[keith smith]

Around 1997 I was working for an HMO as a programmer working under the Director of Underwriting.  I was tasked with creating thousands of spreadsheets each month.  I was constantly hammering the LANS.  That was back when everyone was running Novell.  One of the directors in the IS dept. decided to give us a ultra wide scsi drive and controller that cost the company about $2700, to reduce LANS traffic. (this way I could pull all the data,  process local, and then write the spreadsheets to the shared server.  Instead of using the shared server to store incremental data) We connected that to a discarded 100MHZ/ 4MB RAM tower.  We upgraded the RAM to 16MB and that thing came alive.  It was at least 10 times faster than in its stock configuration.  Depending on how quick I could pull down the data over the network, the process would take 6 or 8 hours to sometime into the evening/night.

It was an eye opening experience.  RAM and faster drives can do wonders.


------------------------

Keith Smith

--- On Mon, 9/13/10, Steve Franks <bahamasfranks at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Steve Franks <bahamasfranks at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Tfug] Questions on unusual hard disks - AV, SSD
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org>
Date: Monday, September 13, 2010, 10:36 AM

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Zack Williams <zdwzdw at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm considering an SSD boot drive and bigger conventional drive for
>> /home.  Would an SSD boot drive give me any actual advantage with my
>> older SATA controller?
>
> Yes.  SSD's have almost no seek time, which is the biggest performance
> killer on disks, and is why SSD's have such a high number of
> operations per second.   Transfer rate isn't an issue unless you're
> copying huge files all the time, and even then a SSD will beat
> spinning rust.

I put a 30GB PATA SSD in a ~5yr old compaq V2000 (1.7GHz/512MB), and
it absolutely smokes with Ubuntu.  Boots usably in 10 seconds.  I was
going to junk the thing until it got the SSD; it was completely
useless by modern standards with XP and a 5400rpm PATA; took like 90
seconds to boot, and took forever to load apps.

Steve

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