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agent_jdh
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Joined: 08 Aug 2002
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Location: Scotland
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 Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 12:23 pm Post subject: |
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| drz wrote: | agent_jdh,
Are you sure on that... I though it was better to do just that...
bus0: HD0, CDburner
bus1: HD1, CDrom
This way the load is distributed over the controller...
A new harddisk pushes 40-50mb/s
When putting two harddrives on the same channel, then it will get cosy... ata100 will barely be able to give max performance...
So, I don't agree with you...
BTW: If I'm not mistaken ATA and ATAPI are exactly the same! (not 100% sure though) |
ATA and ATAPI are technically not the same. They use the same interface though, but it isn't advisable to mix them on the same IDE bus.
You'd be much better going with
IDE0: HD0,HD1
IDE1: CDRom,CDBurner
And as the max continuous data throughput of a modern drive is ~45mb/s then you'll be OK on an ATA100 interface. And if drives/interfaces get much faster then something will have to be done about the PCI bus as that will be saturated with I/O and become the bottleneck. |
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zalix!
n00b
Joined: 25 Jul 2003
Posts: 3
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 4:19 pm Post subject: IBM deskstar |
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| I've had an IBM deskstar 45 GB go bad. It worked fine for a year or so. |
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AgenT
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Joined: 18 May 2003
Posts: 280
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 4:32 pm Post subject: |
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This is somewhat OT (but hey, think of it as a free bump), but how does one go about analyzing a HD (for bad sectors, etc.) on Linux not using HD-specific (as in SMART) tech?
And I had a VERY bad experience with old WD drives (back in the p133 days). Those things gave me bad sectors after like 5 reformats (hey, it was during the win95/98 days, what did you expect?). Other than that, no problems with any HD that I have ever seen except during accidents such as a friend falling on his PC once while running a game which killed the hard drive. |
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agent_jdh
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 4:46 pm Post subject: |
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| AgenT wrote: | This is somewhat OT (but hey, think of it as a free bump), but how does one go about analyzing a HD (for bad sectors, etc.) on Linux not using HD-specific (as in SMART) tech?
And I had a VERY bad experience with old WD drives (back in the p133 days). Those things gave me bad sectors after like 5 reformats (hey, it was during the win95/98 days, what did you expect?). Other than that, no problems with any HD that I have ever seen except during accidents such as a friend falling on his PC once while running a game which killed the hard drive. |
The best way is to interrogate the drive to see if there are any entries in the grown defect list, but I don't know of any Linux tools that can do this. We used proprietary software where I worked that ran under Dos. I've got an all-scsi system at home and Adaptec EZ-SCSI under Windows provides that function.
The best you can probably do is to run fsck on each partition with the -c option, this checks for bad blocks (and is non-destructive). Best to only do it on unmounted partitions so you might want to boot off a LiveCD to do this. |
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Nope
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Joined: 01 Jan 2003
Posts: 25
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 7:03 pm Post subject: |
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Hello,
I had two IBM 40GB Deskstar that die on me.
And.. surprisingly several IBM 16GB SCA-SCSI drives. I think all over all there were three of them dying in 1,5 years. They worked in a RAID5 system.
I have an old 20 GB Maxtor that is working without a glitch since a few years and I recently purchased a 120GB Samsung. Although 5400 rpm this drive is quite fast. But I have several non-contiguous inodes on it. So I don't trust it really.
Nope |
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someguy
Guru
Joined: 10 Jul 2003
Posts: 433
Location: (-_-) .::OH_WELL::. (-_-)
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 9:41 pm Post subject: |
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i have a 10 gig ibm thats worked REALLY well ummm i have had bad luck with western digital (30 gig models) had 3 of them die on me in a year
but ive got one of those 180 gig maxtors with the controller card and 8 mg cache
its blazin well thats my 2 cents l8r
_________________
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
while [ 1 ] ; do echo "*" | telnet ip.of.print.er 9100 ; done |
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bos_mindwarp
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Joined: 19 Oct 2002
Posts: 275
Location: stockholm, sweden
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 7:09 am Post subject: |
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I have lost 3 drivs in past 2 years (I have 3 PC's, 1 firewall, 1 server, and a desktop). All three of them were IBM Deskstars, 1 30Gb, 1 60Gb and 1 80Gb.
Recently I switched over to Western Digital drives, and so far so good (crosses fingers). |
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Reformist
Guru
Joined: 06 Oct 2002
Posts: 323
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 7:21 am Post subject: |
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I just recently had an IBM Deskstar XP 60GB drive fail on me.... apparently lots of people have trouble with this model drive, and a friend of mine has had 4 of them reliably fail on him within 4 years. IBM seems to replace them just fine, but they DIE!!! Lost all of my data (hadn't run backup in a month, because I changed locations). Anyway, Seagate all the way for me from now on... I have 2 80GB WD's, and they've never crashed (although they haven't been under much stress).
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Malakin
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Joined: 14 Apr 2002
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Location: Victoria BC Canada
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 4:57 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | It's good that you've got a space between the drives |
This is an excellent point, always leave gaps between your drives, don't sandwich them together. If you've run out of 3.5" space use a 3.5"->5.25" adapter.
| Quote: | | This is somewhat OT (but hey, think of it as a free bump), but how does one go about analyzing a HD (for bad sectors, etc.) on Linux not using HD-specific (as in SMART) tech? |
man badblocks
| Quote: | ATA and ATAPI are technically not the same. They use the same interface though, but it isn't advisable to mix them on the same IDE bus.
You'd be much better going with
IDE0: HD0,HD1
IDE1: CDRom,CDBurner |
I couldn't dissagree with this more. Putting the hard drives on different ide channels allows them to be used simultaneously, otherwise one has to wait for the other, this removes a lot of performance benefit you can get out of using a 2nd drive for your swap partition etc..
If you plan on doing CD copying or moving data between drives you'll get much better performance if you make a hard drive master and CDROM slave on each channel. Try to keep your CD Burner on a different channel then the hard drive it's usually burning data from though.
A quote from the ATA FAQ:
"ATAPI uses the ATA hardware interface at the physical level but uses a subset of the SCSI command set at the logical level."
http://www.ata-atapi.com/hiwfaq.htm |
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AgenT
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Joined: 18 May 2003
Posts: 280
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 6:06 pm Post subject: |
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Thank you!
| Quote: | | Quote: |
You'd be much better going with
IDE0: HD0,HD1
IDE1: CDRom,CDBurner |
I couldn't dissagree with this more. Putting the hard drives on different ide channels allows them to be used simultaneously, otherwise one has to wait for the other, this removes a lot of performance benefit you can get out of using a 2nd drive for your swap partition etc..
If you plan on doing CD copying or moving data between drives you'll get much better performance if you make a hard drive master and CDROM slave on each channel. Try to keep your CD Burner on a different channel then the hard drive it's usually burning data from though. |
Malakin is correct. You do NOT want to do this:
IDE0: HD0,HD1
IDE1: CDRom,CDBurner
Instead, you are much better off doing this:
IDE0: HDA, CDRom
IDE1: HDB, CDBurner
I assume that HDA will be your main HD. This setup will give you the following. First, when using a CDRom, it is unlikely that you will also need to do heavy work on the HD and vice-versa. Second, if you ever need to burn files from your HD (HDA), having the CDBurner on a different IDE channel will aliviate the stress one will cause on the other. The same is true when doing direct cd to cdr copies since they will both be on two different channels. The only bad thing about this setup (and you will always have some type of bottleneck when using four deviced on two channels) is burning from HDB to the CDBurner. Note, that if you ever need to do something cd intensive which might interfere with HDA, you can always use CDBurner instead of CDRom. Hope that helps... |
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agent_jdh
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Joined: 08 Aug 2002
Posts: 1783
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 9:01 pm Post subject: |
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| AgenT wrote: | Thank you!
| Quote: | | Quote: |
You'd be much better going with
IDE0: HD0,HD1
IDE1: CDRom,CDBurner |
I couldn't dissagree with this more. Putting the hard drives on different ide channels allows them to be used simultaneously, otherwise one has to wait for the other, this removes a lot of performance benefit you can get out of using a 2nd drive for your swap partition etc..
If you plan on doing CD copying or moving data between drives you'll get much better performance if you make a hard drive master and CDROM slave on each channel. Try to keep your CD Burner on a different channel then the hard drive it's usually burning data from though. |
Malakin is correct. You do NOT want to do this:
IDE0: HD0,HD1
IDE1: CDRom,CDBurner
Instead, you are much better off doing this:
IDE0: HDA, CDRom
IDE1: HDB, CDBurner
I assume that HDA will be your main HD. This setup will give you the following. First, when using a CDRom, it is unlikely that you will also need to do heavy work on the HD and vice-versa. Second, if you ever need to burn files from your HD (HDA), having the CDBurner on a different IDE channel will aliviate the stress one will cause on the other. The same is true when doing direct cd to cdr copies since they will both be on two different channels. The only bad thing about this setup (and you will always have some type of bottleneck when using four deviced on two channels) is burning from HDB to the CDBurner. Note, that if you ever need to do something cd intensive which might interfere with HDA, you can always use CDBurner instead of CDRom. Hope that helps... |
No, no, no. We did a lot of work into this at the large-oem-that-shall-remain-nameless I used to work for as an IDE HDD engineer. We found that there was little or no _relative_ (I'll touch on this later) performance loss in using 2 HDD's on the same IDE channel, as long as the DMA mode used was sufficient to allow both drives headroom to operate at their maximum steady-state throughput (obviously there was a performance hit when both drives tried to empty their caches simultaneously, but this is a very fast transient aspect of an HDDs performance and not as important as the constant data streaming aspect of the drive). Even 2 fast 7200rpm HDDs can not saturate an ATA-100 interface, and with new ATA-133 and SATA interfaces this is even less of an issue.
I'm fully aware that ATAPI (Advanced Technology Attachment - Packet Interface) is a protocol layer on top of ATA to enable the use of what are essentially (internally) SCSI removable media devices on a physical ATA connector. It still does not mean that mixing ATA and ATAPI devices on the same channel is OK.
Now when we looked at accessing devices on each channel when a mix of ATA and ATAPI devices were on the same channel, e.g. in a configuration as you are recommending, there was the potential for HDD access on each channel to be crippled when using the ATAPI device simultaneously - sometimes even when the ATAPI device was not in use. Now there were a lot of variables that came in to play regarding precisely what level of performance hit there was (type of ATAPI device e.g. cdrom, cdrw, ide zip disk etc; manufacturer of HDD and ATAPI device, firmware revisions of all the devices, motherboard chipset, operating system drivers etc etc) - you can see that this instantly adds up to quite a complex little equation and that it would be _very_ difficult to advise on what mixes of devices would be OK and what could potentially lead to a significant performance hit. It was obvious to us that the path of least resistance to consistent performance without having to worry about all those variables was not to mix the two protocols on the same IDE channel.
Now earlier on I talked about _relative_ performance hits. Don't get me wrong, having four devices on two IDE channels will incur a hit regardless of the configuration, we were looking to minimise the hit for most of the people most of the time. This touches upon one of the fundamental limitations of the IDE I/O subsystem - it just isn't as good as SCSI at coping with accessing lots of devices without slowing down.
Now when all is said and done, if you are happy with your IDE setup and there are no obvious slowdowns for your usage profile, then "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". All I'm doing is advising what is generally the best course of action in a non-specific case.
If you have four IDE devices and are really searching for best performance, it might be an idea to get a PCI IDE card for your 2nd HDD and connect it to that, thus giving both of your HDDs maximum bandwidth on its own IDE channel. As a lot of mobos these days are coming with raid controllers/sata connectors in addition to the standard IDE ports, it may not even be necessary to buy an external card. |
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dwstrebel
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Joined: 12 Feb 2003
Posts: 6
Location: Alton, Illinois
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 9:10 pm Post subject: |
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I think it is your own prefrence just some people like gentoo and some people like Slackware, but stay away from ibm
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AgenT
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Joined: 18 May 2003
Posts: 280
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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| agent_jdh wrote: | | <enter long post here from above> |
Score: +5, Informative
Very nice and easy to follow analysis of what you and the company you worked for did. Thank you!
My one question is this, were there problems from having both the cdrom and cdrw on the same channel? Especially when doing cd-to-cdr copy? Or, being an OEM, was this not expected from your customer?
[Note that I do use more than one HD/cdrw so that each device has its own channel. And your advice on getting an extra ide card hits the nail on the coffin.]
P.S. What is with the forum and adding useless end tags at the end of messages upon submit? Very windows like of it! 
Last edited by AgenT on Tue Aug 05, 2003 9:37 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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agent_jdh
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Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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| dwstrebel wrote: | | I think it is your own prefrence just some people like gentoo and some people like Slackware, but stay away from ibm |
LARF. Don't you mean Hitachi  |
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agent_jdh
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Joined: 08 Aug 2002
Posts: 1783
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 11:09 pm Post subject: |
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| AgenT wrote: | | agent_jdh wrote: | | <enter long post here from above> |
Score: +5, Informative
Very nice and easy to follow analysis of what you and the company you worked for did. Thank you!
My one question is this, were there problems from having both the cdrom and cdrw on the same channel? Especially when doing cd-to-cdr copy? Or, being an OEM, was this not expected from your customer?
[Note that I do use more than one HD/cdrw so that each device has its own channel. And your advice on getting an extra ide card hits the nail on the coffin.]
P.S. What is with the forum and adding useless end tags at the end of messages upon submit? Very windows like of it! |
Cheers. You have no idea of the amount of work involving spreadsheets and graphs I had to do on this one 
To answer your question, cd-to-cdr copying was one of the main considerations that was looked into, and, to paraphrase our conclusion (I say 'our', but basically it was mine), "atapi devices are so slow in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make a blind bit of difference". Errr, with the caveat that they at least support some decent DMA mode e.g. UDMA33.
It's much better to avoid any potential conflict of interest between ATA and ATAPI devices that may or may not behave with each other than it is to worry about the other stuff.
Re an additional PCI IDE card, if you have the spare PCI slot and IRQ to go with it, splitting up your HDDs in this manner rather than mixing them up with ATAPI devices is _definitely_ the best solution, bar switching to SCSI, which is what I use in my main home box that has multiple devices. |
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AgenT
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Joined: 18 May 2003
Posts: 280
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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Thank you again for your expertise in the subject.
Besides working on the IDE bus, have you done any extensive research on other "bottlenecks" (or the lack of) such as memory bandwidth, I/O, etc? |
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agent_jdh
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Posts: 1783
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 11:57 pm Post subject: |
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| AgenT wrote: | Thank you again for your expertise in the subject.
Besides working on the IDE bus, have you done any extensive research on other "bottlenecks" (or the lack of) such as memory bandwidth, I/O, etc? |
The next big bottleneck is the PCI bus. It's a severe performance issue with lots of devices trying to grab a chunk of bandwidth at the same time. PCI is outdated in a modern system. |
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TripKnot
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Joined: 29 May 2002
Posts: 213
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| Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2003 9:51 am Post subject: |
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| People, don't waste time with this "what drives have/have not worked" crap. Why reinvent the wheel when storagereview.com already has a drive reliability database. |
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Malakin
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Joined: 14 Apr 2002
Posts: 1692
Location: Victoria BC Canada
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| Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2003 7:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | We found that there was little or no _relative_ (I'll touch on this later) performance loss in using 2 HDD's on the same IDE channel |
This isn't what I experience and it's simple to test. Copying files from hda->hdb is slower then copying files from hda->hdc. Or you can do a kernel compile on a machine without much ram with a swap file on hda and hdc, it's faster with it on hdc.
| Quote: | | Now when we looked at accessing devices on each channel when a mix of ATA and ATAPI devices were on the same channel, e.g. in a configuration as you are recommending, there was the potential for HDD access on each channel to be crippled when using the ATAPI device simultaneously - sometimes even when the ATAPI device was not in use. |
I think what you're referring to is older buggy CD drives, as far as I know this isn't a problem anymore.
| Quote: | | Even 2 fast 7200rpm HDDs can not saturate an ATA-100 interface |
Some of the newer 7200rpm drives are able to do a little over 50MB/s and most new drives do just under 50MB/s so it's quite possible a 100MB/s interface is a bottleneck in some cases. |
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Blurpy
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 11 Feb 2003
Posts: 111
Location: Norway
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| Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2003 1:52 pm Post subject: |
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| I had an IBM 20gb drive that suddenly got "click-of-death". I almost thought my pc was going to explode with all that ticking inside. I got a few bluescreens (win98, a looong time ago), and a couple of lockups from that disk before I sent it back for replacement. It was around a year old when it started happening. |
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xTango
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Joined: 11 Jun 2002
Posts: 15
Location: Argentina
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| Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2003 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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I buried two IBM DeskStar (20 GB, 7200 RPM).
And I've seen some Quantum BigFoot die (being they almost new).
I've had some bad experiencies with Seagate (Medallist) being too d*mn slow, so I don't like them. WD are my favourites. They're pretty fast, even the 5400 RPM models. |
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Kernel & Hardware
