On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 06:17:30PM -0800, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
> 
> Let's face it, we can do better.  RAID card vendors put RAID 0,1,5
> implementations into reasonably small amounts of flash every day ..
> I mean, the firmware updates fit easily onto a floppy with lots of
> room to spare.  And then they proceed to run that firmware on i960s,
> which aren't the fastest CPUs around.

It's noteworthy that:

1) Last time I picked one of those update floppies apart, the i960
   code on it turned out to be LZW-compressed.  Is RAIDframe really
   more than 2MB of object code?

2) It's just plain *astounding* how inefficient some of those
   implementations are.  On hardware with comparable memory bandwidth
   and CPU cycles available, *and lacking hardware XOR support*, with
   the same disks, RAIDframe is often considerably faster.  I have
   never understood how some RAID vendors' firmware can consistently
   perform so poorly.

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
   But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
 objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp!  You towel!  You
 plate!" and so on.              --Sigmund Freud