Usually using both master and slave on an IDE channel spells disaster
performance wise, and I would be surprised if the hotplug stuff worked
with this as well...
>
> He will have groups of about 4 drives on each channel wich
> serialize each other due to excessive IRQ line sharing and
> master slave issues.
Use 8 controllers for the 15 (16) drives.
>
> 8 x 130MBy/s >>>> PCI bus throughput... I would rather recommend
> a classical RAID controller card for this kind of
> setup.
Because RAID controllers do not use the PCI bus ??? ;)
The bus-overhead on RAID-5 is not too bad unless you specifically construct
a workload to make it so (writes-only, scattered so that the kernel cannot
cache stripes to avoid read-in for parity calculation).
Sure, the PCI bus will be a bottleneck, and PCI overhead alone will decrease
the real-world performance to somewhere below the theoretical PCI bandwidth
limitations, but don't let this blind you - 100 MB/sec sustained transfers
can still be "good enough" for many people.
By the way, has anyone tried such larger multi-controller setups, and tested
the bandwidth in configurations with multiple PCI busses on the board, versus a
single PCI bus ?
--
................................................................
: jakob@unthought.net : And I see the elder races, :
:.........................: putrid forms of man :
: Jakob Østergaard : See him rise and claim the earth, :
: OZ9ABN : his downfall is at hand. :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............:
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