Chris,
Unfortunately, I got squeezed out of Adaptec some time ago so I have not been paying a lot of attention to the stock.
I have been paying attention to disk performance and I'm a bit concerned over what I am seing. I just set up a Linux system with both an EIDE drive (Maxtor 5.4GB UDMA) and a SCSI2UW one (second generation 9 GB Seagate Cheetah). On the EIDE drive, I got about 10 MBps for both input and output with a CPU utilization of a little over 10%. For the SCSI2UW I got about 17 MBps for both input and output but the CPU utilization was over 25%. This is surprising. Partially it could be due to an immature SCSI driver on the Linux system, but I doubt that is all there is to it. I never thought I would see it, but UDMA seems to have caught up.
Someone else pointed this out here some time ago and I didn't believe it. He was right and I was wrong.
I honestly do not know which way to jump any longer. Sure, you can put in more SCSI drives, but you do reach bus limitations pretty soon. Yes, the 160 will increase those, but then there is the PCI bus and all that.
Also, servers are becoming *cheap* and it is pretty easy to break up a single monolithic server into multiple smaller servers each with a lot less disk space. You can connect them via 100/1000 Mbps switched Ethernet and you will be in good shape. There are just so many possibilities.
Sorry I can't tell you much of anything. I'm staying out of the computer technology stocks right now. I play with biotechs instead. If I'm going to get burned, I might as well fry..... :-) On the other hand, I think there are some excellent opportunities in the biotech market.
Cheers, Torben |
