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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1748)	7/19/1998 9:52:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

NT Ws supports striping, but I don't <g>. It is possible to stripe as many drives as you can hang on the box up to (nominally) 32, or at least according to the documentation; I haven't tried it myself. I don't have any info on performance of NT striping, nor do I know the details of the implementation. Given proper implementation, significant gains could be achieved, possibly up to N times where N is the number of volumes less some unknown (to me) overhead due to multiple I/O operations and the inevitable competition for resources at various levels (bus, controller, OS, memory, etc, etc). Even though SCSI can handle multiple simultaneous outstanding operations, the bus throughput is limited and there is contention on it. There is always some overhead. Often it is significant, even when there is theoretically enough aggregate bandwidth. There are plenty of shared resources in the chain with the inevitable queueing around each resource. If you're familiar with queueing models, you know that throughput ALWAYS contains a factor of 1/(1-resourcebusyfraction). Other factors can depend on scheduling algorithms, but that one can't be eliminated. Practically speaking, the slowdown becomes noticeable at around 10% busy. It is EXTREMELY difficult to drive such resources beyond about 70% busy, especially if there is a lot of variance in service times (another factor is the mean square deviation of the service time -- it's called the dispersion for good reason). I don't have any good feel for how this comes down for striped disks. Clearly it depends on the controllers, the distribution of disks, and the software implementation, among many other things. One "other thing" be on-board disk cache on the disk side of the controller bus (a tremendous advantage because it sits at the other end of all the queued shared resources and is used only by the single disk drive). I don't know where a caching controller's cache sits relative to the bus bottleneck, or even if there is a predefined place for it. Sorry not to be more help. To my mind, striping is just too risky, though I can see that for work files, swap files, temp files, etc, there could be major uses in certain environments. I trust the disks a lot more than I trust NT, actually. I'd be ESPECIALLY worried about NT's suffering a minor glitch and forgetting the stripe configuration than the physical disks themselves. Then, bye-bye data. Spots

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1748)	7/22/1998 4:07:00 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Hi Zeuspaul & thread, Just wanted to tell those who offered assistance to me awhile back that Kristi is finally going on her skates. It took a whole new system to accomplish the feat. Sincere thanks for everyone's help at the time. Best wishes, Ann

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1748)	7/22/1998 9:37:00 PM
From: Street Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

I really want my computer built! I begin to put my order in at Totally Aewsome and he listens to me and says: For what you are doing, go for a 400mhz, but more importantly a SCSI drive. He said that a 300 with a SCSI is faster than a 400 without. He also is having some problems with Win 98 and won't put it on computers until there are some new patches released. The operating system upgrades are free, forever. Because I want to get my computer done very soon, I may just buy the Colorgraphics or Appian. Your thoughts on an SCSI drives and the current situation with Win 98/matrox drivers? Regards, S.W.

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1748)	7/24/1998 2:11:00 AM
From: halfscot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Zeuspaul or anyone: I am in need of a little advice. I currently have an IBM clone w/a P133. I would like more speed while staying w/the socket 7 motherboard and have been eyeballing the new AMD K6 300 MHz as a possible candidate for the best possible price/performance. My primary question centers around the motherboard for this processor. Is there a clear choice in performance between the different M/Bs available? Are there other considerations I should be aware of and would it make a difference in the choice? Thanks for any advice you can provide. halfscot