Hi,

The post of Richard Rauch stimulated me to post
more on hd stuff with questions.
I got two harddrives: a WD 2.5 gig and a WD 8.4 gig.
I connected them on the primairy ide controller.
Then i bought a 20 gig ibm drive.
I planted the 2.5 WD drive on the secundairy controller
together with the cdrom and the new ibm drive on the primairy
controller together with the 8.4 wd drive.
I noticed a significant downgrade of disk performance.
Up till now i dont know, but it is very well possible
that two disks of different brands dont go to well
together on the same ide controller. Allthough ....
this shouldnt be the case and should be .... crap ... it could
be possible. How else can i explain the downgrade of performance.
Or perhaps my powersupply cant handle three disks and a cdrom
properly?

Now i'm thinking on buying a promise tx2 ide controller
which is a pci card, the netbsd pciide driver supports it now.
Besides that ... im looking at a pci bus of 33 mhz and 32 bit.
So theoretically .... 33*4 (bytes) is 132 mbyte/sec is the max
speed of the pci bus ... so a udma 133 can never be fully supported
and performance wise be reached by such a controller,
unless you got a faster pci bus.
And if i aint wrong the netbsd core wdc driver supports
up to udma mode 5, so up to udma100.
So i still got to figure out if its really helpful to such
a controller. Though ... im positive that it'll gain some performance
at least. Anybody got some experience in this concerning performace
and other stuff and/or bottlenecks?
In the case of such a controller i'll disable both the ide controllers on the
mainboard in the bios.
I believe to fully make use of it, i 
got to have ide controllers which support udma 100/133, the bios
must support it, the disks need to support udma and the os
needs to support udma, the controllers as well
and of course i need udma 80-conductor ide cables.
In my case for example: netbsd does support the promise tx2
udma 133 controller (even though i'll put it into a 33 mhz / 32 bit
pci bus .... cardslot ) ...... :-(
On that pci card their is an own bios which supports it.
I got the 80-conductor ide cables which support udma.
I got a disk which supports udma 100, only question then:
the speed concerning the pci bus. I also have several netbsd interfaces
in the pci slots .... so suppose using the
disks and interfaces at the same time...?
Will i be able with this controller to use the disks at 
udma100?

Makes me thinking: suppose you got an internal network running
on gig ethernet/full duplex. The theoretical
max speed is then 125 meg/sec full duplex.
Since an ide controller can only do one thing at a time you'll be
stuck when you have multiple network interfaces at such a speed.
Perhaps then scsi is the only logical to use in such a case,
or ide raid? Any suggestions?
Bye,

Mipam.