on 6/18/00 3:48 PM, Matthew Reilly at mjreilly@inch.com wrote something
like:

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

    Same on my G3. Promax sells an Ultra ATA/33 add in card that *might*
even be OF bootable for about $40 if you're interested. At some point I
might buy a Peecee Ultra ATA/66 card and cdboot NetBSD on it. Get this:
MacOS doesn't support IDE slave devices on this machine, NetBSD works
without a hitch.

>> 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

    Someone else can correct me on this, but I don't think so. According to
FWB HDT v3.0, my Mac G3 DT 233 neither supports fast data transfer nor does
it support sync transfers. That leaves you with Narrow slow 8bit single
ended SCSI. AFAIK, the only Apple hardware that actually did anything better
than that was some of the Workgroup server series and the Apple Server xxx
series. I think it's a 53C96 if you want to check what you're system has.

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

    Sorry I don't have better news. You can always use energy saver to set
the HD timeout to like 20 minutes or so.

> 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?

    Hmm, SCSI performance might be better, but from what I know, Sbus makes
Nubus look snappy :) You would probably get significantly better overall
performance sticking with your PCI based system. Even at 28MHz bus speed
(IIRC), I'd be willing to bet it blows the Sparc out of the water.


    Chris