CompuServe Messages

Trust me, trust me, trust me. I know a few things… 🙂 SCSI-I has a maximum theoretical transfer of 5MB/s. SCSI-II has the same theoretical maximum. SCSI-II Fast (found on the 4091 and Fastlane) has a theoretical maximum of 10MB/s. SCSI-II Fast Wide, 20MB/s. Maximum theoretical and actual practical are not the same. The laws of physics limit how fast manufacturers have been able to make drives spin, and hence, how much data they can pull off the platters. RAM cache on the drives can sometimes make the drive faster for certain kinds of operations. RAID boxes (a simple example would be eight drives tied together such that one is used for each bit of each byte read/written to the array) can overcome this, but are not in your budget. The real advantage of SCSI-II shows when multiple drives are being accessed simultaneously, not when a single fast device is in use. When testing a Barracuda drive with an A4091 and Fastlane, I was unable to get over 5MB/s from the drive's cache. Zorro-III overhead makes it impractical. The 4000T will do about 7MB/s from that drive's cache. But again, these are not sustained speeds, these are cache speeds. I'll say it one more time: There is nothing you are going to do with your A3000 for which this is going to make a difference. — Dale L. Larson, Intangible Assets Manufacturing