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Single IDE vs Dual IDE?

Posted by Cliff on from the that-second-chain-induces-a-performance-hit dept.

jrsimmons asks: "I'm running performance tests on IDE interface configurations for my company. I've discovered that disk to disk I/O is significantly faster (in the realm of 30%-40%) when only a single IDE interface is active versus when two IDE interfaces are active. This is significant as our servers are used to provide Point-of-Sale availability for registers in the retail environment, which is heavily dependent on disk i/o performance for efficiency. I have run the tests under both Windows and our retail OS (sorry, no Linux) with similar results. What are some possible explanations for the detrimental effect the second active ide controller has on disk I/O speed?" Has anyone measured this deficiency on Linux and other Unices?

1 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds strange by Outland+Traveller · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your results sound strange to me.

    For two disks, you should get the best results with both disks configured as masters on two different IDE buses.

    If you're not seeing that, I'd check that you have the correct drivers/optimizations for your IDE chipset enabled. You also might want to check IRQ allocation to make sure there's no strange conflicts . Check your windows (NT/2000) event log to make sure there's no strange IDE timeouts indicating hardware issues. If you still see the problem you should try your test on a different hardware platform (motherboard/controller combo).

    From your description, however, you might want to go with a raid technology such as RAID 1, RAID 5, or raid 1+0. It will offer much better redundancy and possibly improved performance.