Hard Drives Hard drives can be a big
Hard Drives Hard drives can be a big performance bottleneck. While IDE drives are cheaper than bricks, they can slow down your system roughly as well as bricks can. A SCSI disk system can transfer data to and from each and every drive on the SCSI bus at the full speed of the SCSI controller, while an IDE controller splits its available throughput between the drives on the bus. Also, a SCSI controller can have up to 15 drives, while an IDE controller can have no more than 2. In a throughput competition, I’ll back 15 drives moving at full speed against 2 drives moving at an average of half-speed any day. Still, if all you have are IDE drives, you can do some things to alleviate these problems. Most important, put your hard disks on separate controllers! Many systems now have a hard drive on one IDE controller and a CD-ROM on the other. When you add a second hard drive, put it on the same controller as the CD-ROM drive. You probably won’t be using the CD-ROM nearly as often as you use the hard drive, after all, and this will reduce contention on each IDE channel. You’ll be happiest with at least 1GB of disk on your system, though I’m assuming in This Blog that you have at least 10GB of disk. If you have a smaller disk, you’ll want to be careful to clean up after yourself. For example, at one point I recommend keeping old source code around for later use; if you don’t have enough disk space, don’t do that! Page 37
Hint: This post is supported by Gama besplatan domen provider