[svlug] Multi drive PCI SATA card or 6 port SATA motherboard

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 17:28:50 -0800
Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (mail at webthatworks.it):
> 
> > Nvidia released open source drivers for agp and other stuff that now
> > are integral part of the kernel.  nvidia should perform a bit better
> > than sil on md.

> That's possible, but historically differences in driver code maturity
> have often produced performance differences that have swamped
> theoretical hardware advantages -- not to mention that the bottleneck is 
> usually physical disk access, anyway.  So, I'd test before rushing to that
> conclusion.  (Preferably, test doing something _real_:  Most HD
> performance tests have inadvertantly relied on test scenarios involving
> quiescent systems doing sequential reads from adjoining cylinders --
> which I call the "everyone's a DOS user" error.)

Maybe... the few benchmark I saw ran on XP where drivers may make a big difference.
They were not written by the same person, under scrutiny of several with the chance to compare them... so the *drivers* may perform very differently.
But nvidia was sucking just in cpu load... that I think could be attributed to the drivers rather than the hardware.

> > What I mean is that if he is going to use md, onboard ctls work quite fast.

> Good point.  I think he's stuck mostly because he wants a whole lot of
> connectors -- and would prefer not to buy a new motherboard, if he can
> help it.

It depends on how old is his current hardware.