brad@corpane.UUCP (Brad Lineberger) (03/30/89)
Just for a bit of trivia, I thought I would post some SCSI speed differences we have noticed between SCO XENIX version 2.2 as distributed by ACER, and MICROPORT UNIX version 3.0.e.1. The SCO driver apparently was written by a third party firm, as it didnt appear to contain SCO copyright information. I think this is the firm that wrote the SCSI driver for ADAPTEC. I fully admit I cannot be sure of this. The MICROPORT driver was written inhouse from the ground up. This may or may not be an advantage. Please note that the driver was later updated to support SCSI tape, this is not the driver we observed though. The "gist" of the observations is that both implementations of the SCSI device drivers (SCO and uPORT) *SMOKED* (pardon the informality) their ESDI and RLL counterparts. We were VERY impressed with the speed improvements over our ESDI system. The ADAPTEC controller we were using apparently can handle many IO requests simultaneously, and this made compiling on multiple sessions MUCH faster. The speed difference was so great that our MIS manager decided to cut our losses COMPLETELY with ESDI and hit the scuzzy trail. Im sure their are some ESDI fans out there, so I would like to state clearly that these are only individual observations, and not part of some vast, organized study. On a side note, the uPORT scsi driver seemed to handle Multiple IO requests with much greater efficiency than the SCO driver. We noticed this when compiling 3 programs, uncompressing news, and playing a few games of TETRIX on other sessions (grin). In this environment, the uPORT driver really shined. PS The test machines were an ACER system 15, and a COMPAQ 386/20, using an ARNET Intelligent 8 port serial board, and 8megs of memory on each machine. (And an ADAPTEC AH1540A controller).. Please note we did try each driver on each machine. Just a bit of trivia for the driver-adicts out there.. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brad Lineberger Plan: None (Dont use BSD or ultrix) Bitnet: WBLINE01@ULKYVX Tel : (502)-491-4433 (Work) Usenet: ...!ukma!corpane!brad ...!ddsw1!corpane!brad