Software
|
Hardware
|
Old
|
Windows NT4SP6
|
333 MHz Pentium II
4 GB 7200 RPM Ultra-Wide SCSI drives
(RAP: 9MBps per drive)
|
New
|
Windows 2000
|
2 x 733 MHz Pentium III
18GB SCSI 10,000 RPM Ultra160 SCSI drives
(RAP: 24MBps per drive)
27GB 5,400 RPM UltraATA/66 IDE drives
(RAP: 19MBps per drive)
|
|
Table 1 – The experiments.
|
To allow price comparisons, here are the prices we paid for the various components.
Dell Precision 420
|
$3,750
|
Dual Channel SCSI controller
|
$235
|
Quantum Atlas 10K Ultra160 SCSI 18 GB disks
|
$534
|
3ware 3W-5400 IDE RAID adapter
|
$255
|
Quantum Fireball lct08 ATA/66 26GB disk
|
$209
|
Table 2 – Prices of hardware components
| Hardware Configuration
Unless otherwise noted, all of the old-old and new-old tests were run on the following hardware. Note that the Riedel study used a 200 MHz Pentium II.
Table 4 – “Old” machine hardware configuration.
|
Host
|
Gateway E-5000
|
Processor: 333 MHz Pentium II
RAM: 64-bit wide, 66 MHz memory interconnect
1 x 128 66 MHz SDRAM
Bus: 32-bit wide, 33 MHz PCI
Host bus adapter: Adaptec 2940UW Ultra-Wide SCSI adapter
IDE controller: 2 independent PCI bus mastering interfaces
|
Disk
|
Name
|
Interface
|
Capacity
|
RPM
|
Seek Time
|
Transfer Rate
|
Cache Size
|
Seagate Barracuda 4LP
Ultra-Wide (ST34371W)
|
SCSI-2
Ultra-Wide
ASA II
|
4.3 GB
|
7200
|
Avg 4.2ms range
1-17
|
External
40 MBps
|
512 KB
|
Internal
10 MBps to
15 MBps
|
Software
|
Old: Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 SP6 using the NT file system
|
New: Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server using the NT file system
|
Unless otherwise noted, all of the new-new tests were run on the following:
Table 5 – “New” machine hardware configuration.
|
Host
|
Dell Precision 420
|
Processor: 2 x 733 MHz Intel Pentium III
RAM: 64-bit wide, 133 MHz memory interconnect
2 x 128 ECC PC800 RDRAM
Bus: 32-bit wide, 33 MHz PCI
Host bus adapter: Adaptec AIC-7899 Ultra160/m SCSI adapter
3ware 3W-5400 IDE RAID adapter
IDE controller: 2 integrated bus mastering interfaces
|
Disk
|
Name
|
Interface
|
Capacity
|
RPM
|
Seek Time
|
Transfer Rate
|
Cache Size
|
Four Quantum Atlas 10K (QM318200TN-LW)
|
Ultra160 Wide LVD
|
18.2 GB
|
10,000
|
Avg 5.0ms
|
External
160 MBps
|
2 MB
|
Internal
18 to 26 MBps
|
Four Quantum Fireball lct08
|
Ultra ATA/66
|
26.0 GB
|
5,400
|
Avg 9.5ms
|
External
66.6 MBps
|
512 KB
|
Internal
32 MBps
|
Software
|
Microsoft Windows 2000 Workstation
NT file system. SQLIO for basic volume striping experiments, Windows 2000 dmio RAID for dynamic volume striping experiments. The 3ware controller’s hardware RAID was used for striped and mirrored dynamic volume IDE experiments.
|
Device Internals Performance
In this section, we examine the performance of some of the internal subsystems in the new-new Dell Precision 420 test machine.
System memory bandwidth was measured using memspeed. memspeed is covered in detail below, in the Testing Methodology section. The results are shown in Figure 1 and Table 6. Rambus RAM is advertised as being capable of a throughput of 1,600MBps. [Rambus] However, on our test machine we were only able to achieve 975MBps on reads and 550MBps on writes. This represents 61% and 34% of the PAP respectively. Compared to what we measured on previous Intel systems, this represents a huge 5x advance in read bandwidth and 3x advance in write bandwidth.
The RAP for our 32bit, 33MHz PCI bus was 98.5MBps, a full 74% of the PAP of 133MBps when 1MB requests were sent to the controller cache. This is 37% more throughput than Riedel was able to achieve on his machine. PCI chipsets have clearly improved. When smaller 64KB requests were used, the RAP was 83.6MBps.
Ultra160 SCSI advertises itself as a 160MBps bus. However, even under ideal conditions, our Ultra160’s PAP is unachievable. The standard 32bit, 33MHz PCI bus found in PCs only has a PAP of 133MBps. This limits Ultra160 adapters to 133MBps at most. In practice, our PCI bus never actually achieves 100% of the PAP so our Ultra160 adapter was limited by its PCI bus interface to 98.5MBps. Even so, its RAP was a respectable 62% of the PAP.
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