Caching disk controllers and 386 multiprocessor

[Paul Gillingwater]

In article <1216 at swusrgrp.UUCP> jeff at swusrgrp.UUCP (Jeff Tye sys adm) writes:
>In article <10 at aostul.UUCP>, steveb at aostul.UUCP (Steve Bogner) writes:
>> 
>> I am trying to put together a very high performance SCO Xenix
>> system and would like to know if anyone out there has had
>> experience (good or bad) with the caching disk controllers made
>> by DPT (Distributed Processing Technologies).  They say you can
>> have a hardware cache of up to 16 MB, reducing disk access to .6
>> ms. 
>
>I've been using and selling the DPT caching disk controllers for over
>a year and a half. I highly recommend the product and the company. The
>performance benefits are outstanding. I like them so much that I propose
>them with every system I sell. The difference is like night and day.
>
Here's another tip for those who want to get the very best performance.
First, I assume you want to run large disks, e.g. 600 Mb plus.  Hint:
don't buy one big disk.  Buy two 300 Mb disk drives, and put them
on different controllers, and when I say different, I mean different,
like use an ESDI for your root partition and a SCSI for your application
data.  You can put two drives on one controller, but you can only access
one of them at a time, whereas with two controllers, you can get much
better throughput - especially if you have to swap out tasks.

So why not two ESDI controllers?  Simple - when you have your multi-port
serial cards, printers, tape backups, VGAs, mouse etc. in the system,
you tend to very quickly run out of IRQ's.

Make sure you use fast caches too!   But be VERY sure that your
operating system will support them. 
-- 
Paul Gillingwater, Computer Sciences of New Zealand Limited
Bang: ..!uunet!dsiramd!csnz!paul    Domain: paul at csnz.co.nz
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