4 ms·

The CF card is a Sandisk Extreme with up to 120MB/s read speed. My guess is the PATA interface on that motherboard is also a bottleneck. I did a disk speed tes

by yeokm1 9y ago

The CF card is a Sandisk Extreme with up to 120MB/s read speed. My guess is the PATA interface on that motherboard is also a bottleneck. I did a disk speed test with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output bs=8k count=2k" I only got 720KB/s.

exikyut 9y ago
TIL! Interesting benchmark. I'd recommend trying bs=256k, which is what Linux is optimized for FWIW. 8k may induce overhead, but I can't say for sure how much of a difference 256k would make. I just briefly poked eBay to find out the price of ISA disk controllers, and found a reasonable number of options within the <$30 bracket. https://www.ebay.com/b/ISA-Internal-Disk-Controllers-RAID-Cards/90715/bn_2785081?rt=nc&_sop=15&_fcid=180 https://www.ebay.com/b/ISA-Internal-Disk-Controllers-RAID-Ca... The nice thing is that Linux will (almost certainly?) have no problem no matter what card you buy, so the question is what the fastest chipset is. I also just found https://wiki.68kmla.org/SCSI_hard_disk_replacement_options#IDE_and_Flash https://wiki.68kmla.org/SCSI_hard_disk_replacement_options#I... which may prove relevant.
- yeokm1 9y ago
  Ok I can give 256K a shot next time. Actually won't the ISA controllers be even slower? I'm not sure what bus the PATA controllers on this PC are connected to but isn't it connected "natively" so to speak? It might even compete for bandwidth with the sound and network card.
  - exikyut 9y ago
    Very, very good point. I'm not sure. Don't quote me, but I think the onboard PATA controller is connected via ISA as well.
    - yeokm1 9y ago
      Very likely the onboard PATA controller is connected via ISA. I had to enable the ISA PATA support during the kernel configuration for Linux to recognise it. In this case, there probably won't be any benefit of having additional ISA controller cards.
      - exikyut 9y ago
        This is very very possible. What I wonder is whether the onboard chipset is slower than the ISA bus - and whether using an external card would eke out a tiny bit more performance. Apparently the ISA bus can stably run at up to 8MHz. It's not on-point but I found this thread that discussed SCSI controllers that was kind of interesting: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=36001 http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=36001 This project is really awesome btw.

by yeokm1 9y ago

exikyut 9y ago

TIL! Interesting benchmark. I'd recommend trying bs=256k, which is what Linux is optimized for FWIW. 8k may induce overhead, but I can't say for sure how much of a difference 256k would make. I just briefly poked eBay to find out the price of ISA disk controllers, and found a reasonable number of options within the <$30 bracket. https://www.ebay.com/b/ISA-Internal-Disk-Controllers-RAID-Cards/90715/bn_2785081?rt=nc&_sop=15&_fcid=180 https://www.ebay.com/b/ISA-Internal-Disk-Controllers-RAID-Ca... The nice thing is that Linux will (almost certainly?) have no problem no matter what card you buy, so the question is what the fastest chipset is. I also just found https://wiki.68kmla.org/SCSI_hard_disk_replacement_options#IDE_and_Flash https://wiki.68kmla.org/SCSI_hard_disk_replacement_options#I... which may prove relevant.

yeokm1 9y ago
Ok I can give 256K a shot next time. Actually won't the ISA controllers be even slower? I'm not sure what bus the PATA controllers on this PC are connected to but isn't it connected "natively" so to speak? It might even compete for bandwidth with the sound and network card.
- exikyut 9y ago
  Very, very good point. I'm not sure. Don't quote me, but I think the onboard PATA controller is connected via ISA as well.
  - yeokm1 9y ago
    Very likely the onboard PATA controller is connected via ISA. I had to enable the ISA PATA support during the kernel configuration for Linux to recognise it. In this case, there probably won't be any benefit of having additional ISA controller cards.
    - exikyut 9y ago
      This is very very possible. What I wonder is whether the onboard chipset is slower than the ISA bus - and whether using an external card would eke out a tiny bit more performance. Apparently the ISA bus can stably run at up to 8MHz. It's not on-point but I found this thread that discussed SCSI controllers that was kind of interesting: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=36001 http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=36001 This project is really awesome btw.