on 6/17/00 12:10 AM, Chris at talon16m@hotmail.com wrote:

> No, I'm not exactly pleased with IDE performance on any platform. Ultra
> 66 sounds promising though.

Yeah, the implementation in the C series is very slow, not even Ultra33,
hence the really high CPU utilization.

>You think your Barracuda is fast now, you should
> grab an add in SCSI card that can do Fast data transfer (10MB/S vs 5MB/s)

Unfortunately both PCI slots are filled with NIC cards. I was always under
the impression that the Mesh chip did 10MB/S. Is this true? The boot message
says:

mesh0 at obio0 offset 0x10000 irq 12: 50MHz, SCSI ID 7

> As far as spinning disks down, yes it can be done. Using Apple's Energy
> Saver control panel or FWB's SCSI Configure (Part of the full version of
> HDT) can set a spin down timeout. However I have picked up from more than a
> few people that you are better off *not* spinning your disk down ever. With
> newer drives you end up putting more wear and tear on the drive spinning
> down and powering up than if you just let it run 24/7.  Secondly, you're not
> likely to get away with having the disk spin down in Unix. Sendmail does
> it's thing at about 2 am, and various log files get turned over daily.
> Unless you were to go through and remove every cron job, including
> sync/update (<- This is NOT recommended); as well as turn off all daily

Thanks for the info, Chris. It looks like I'll just let it spin all the
time, maybe turn it off at night.

On a slightly unrelated note, I may get my hands on a SparcClassic. Anybody
have any ideas how this would do as an Appletalk server (with the Barracuca)
vs. the C500/200?

cheers, 

Matthew