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GenTimJS
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 5:37 pm    Post subject: IDE speeds on sun hardware Reply with quote

Based off of personal experience and reports from other users, IDE on sun hardware seems to be a chokepoint in many systems...

Can anyone with more sparc experience comment on this? The only IDE sun I've got is an U5 which is notoriously slow anyway.


The reason I'm asking, is that I'm going to have to put together a proof-of-concept server based off of a $300 budget for a used sun box.. if it goes well, it will lead to the introduction of some higher-end sun hardware, but those making the call will likely not understand IDE vs SCSI type speed issues with an older system ... so if I get a SB100 or something for this box, am I dooming myself? Whatever I get will become a workstation on my desk (replacing a dell pentium4 65346ghz x86 box) so I'd like to get something a tiny bit smaller than an U80 ...

thoughts?
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squash
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 3:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

Sun has poor taste in IDE chipsets. Get SCSI. Seriously.

With that said..

If you are expecting to find a $300 sun that will give you comparable performance to a pentium4, you should find something better to waste your time with. Keep in mind that the Ultra5 was introduced in 1997, and EOLd in 2001. To put this into perspective, the fastest Intel box you could get in 1997 was Intel's Pentium 233MMX. The Ultra80 shipped in 1999 and was retired in 2002. You get the idea.


The simple fact is you can't compare systems with that much of a time difference in them. Sun has been making the excellent Ultrasparc3 for longer than Intel has been making the Pentium4, and is shipping boxes based on the Ultrasparc4.

I think it is a great idea that you are looking at Sparc systems running Linux, I'm just afraid that you might not have a realistic evaluation. If you have an old Pentium 200 laying around that you were going to compare against, I stand corrected. If you want something fast and speed-competitive with other options, start looking around the V240 range.


Josh
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GenTimJS
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 6:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Actually, I am basically competing with other 5-6 year old hardware ;-)

i basically just want to make sure that the low speed of these boxes isnt going to cause network timeouts and such when doing prolonged nfs/samba read/writes on large files

if the "proof of concept" low-end box goes well, and proves that it functions (regardless of performance), then I will be able to purchase a current-generation sparc system for the actual production use.
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Toady
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2005 8:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well I have an Ultra 10 and also an Ultra 2.

The U2 is SMP with 2x 200Mhz CPU's while the U10 is a single 333Mhz (with the 2Mb Cache).

The U10 has twice the ram of the U2 but has IDE disks...

OK so now you understand what I have, the U10 does feel slow on disk usage, and at the first chance I get its getting SCSI disk !!!

The other thing tempting me is that I could use a PC ATA133 cntroller in it and just keep the boot and root on the internal IDE.. but its not the best option.
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rsborn
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2005 4:36 pm    Post subject: Can you disable internal IDE on U10? Reply with quote

Judging from what I am reading here I take it you cannot disable the internal IDE controller. Is this a true statement?
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Toady
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 8:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dissabling internal IDE isnt the problem..

Booting from SCSI is the problem, since the SUN U5/10 is not a PC a bootable PC based SCSI card is NOT bootable in a SUN.

You need to have a SUN complient SCSI card to enable you to boot from it and ditch the crap IDE altogether.

Either that or you have to get boot and root on the IDE and everything else on a scsi card that can be recognised by the kernel.

To be honest I am not going down that road, I would prefer to find a scsi card and loose the IDE altogether.
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 20, 2005 4:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just to add my $0.02, if you're going to AIM at SPARC hardware for that budget, you'd probably be better off looking at an Ultra 2 (or Ultra 60 if you're lucky).

While it does use SBUS and not PCI, it does come with SCSI and depending on the box you manage to find, dual 300 MHz or dual 400 MHz CPUs would give you just as much if not better performance than a Blade 100 or 150, depending on the operations. Operating on large files shouldn't be much of an issue, other than if you have say 10 people all trying to work on their own invidividual 1GB files at the same time.

I do have a Blade 100 here, into which I've put a SCSI controller and drive. It does chug along faster than with the IDE drive, but it's a real pain to cable it in there as the case was not designed with that style modification in mind. Also the UltraSPARC IIe chips in the Blade 100 or 150s have a lot less CPU cache than a regular UltraSPARC II chip found in the Ultra 2s.

Currently I do a lot of my testing for SPARC on either a 2x300MHz Ultra 2 with 2GB of RAM and a 500 MHz Blade 100 with 2GB of RAM. A large majority of the time, the Ultra 2 will outperform the Blade 100. The 400 MHz CPUs have 4 MB of cache on them, as opposed to the 1MB of cache on the 300MHz, which should make them a good deal more responsive.

Hopefully this helps a bit. Both the IDE controllers in the Ultra 5/10 and the Blade 100/150 are UDMA 33 at best, and often times Blade 100/150 users have to turn off DMA support altogether due to the IDE controller not supporting CRC checking and some issues in the driver in the Linux kernel. Though this is a moot point if you do go for SCSI on a Blade 100/150.
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toyz
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 3:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks... It's clear that throwing in any old SCSI card in the Ultra 5 will probably not allow it to boot off the SCSI disk.

I was wondering if I thew a newer ATA100/133 card (like Promise) in this thing, would it boot off it? Or would I still be having a low boot/root IDE and then a second disk thats fast for data?

Thanks.
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 4:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You'd still need to boot off of the onboard controller.

You can get a Sun compatible SCSI PCI controller off of eBay for around $50 USD which is supported under linux as well (Symbios Logic).

Another alternative would be to netboot a kernel with command line args built in at boot time to point it to the root partition on your machine.
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toyz
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 7:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I was thinking... a solution I thought of earlier today much like your netboot:

A small solid state IDE disk... Small enough to easily fit somewhere in the case. Would it be cost effective...

http://gps.instanet.com/FlashDisk/
(first hit from http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=solid+state+ide&btnG=Google+Search)

$10 isn't bad! Enough for a /boot partition.
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