Re: Grind archive drive

[cz883@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Soren Carlson Spies)]

In a previous article, fmlin@netcom.com (Frank M. Lin) says:

>>Hi everyone,
>>  I called a contact and got these prices for the drive.
>>
>>    Micropolis 1598  (5.25")	$720
>>    Micropolis 2210  (3.5")	$950
>
>For Steve ( Chiang and Nelson )'s information, both are 1 gig drives.
>( unformatted?! ), and a local HD vendor have the following data for them.
>
>1598 is the older series, which is 5.25" full-height.  Average access time
>is 15ms.  2210 is a more more recent 3.5" half-height drive with average
>access time of 10ms.  With the great price difference, I'd say go for
>the 1598.  Since the access of the drive is over the network, I don't
>think speed is that crucial.

	Ahhh, ouch. Grind seems to becoming a rather popular spot, and
the fact that the access is over the net makes a slower drive very bad.
I'm not sure how Unix does it's disk buffering but I doubt if it will
read whole files as soon as you ask for them.  The crucial point I'm
trying to make is that if 10 people are d/l'ing 10 different files the
disk is going to be getting rather thrashed.  Granted, these people's
ftp will only be so fast, and I haven't done my math, but it seems that
the 15 ms is going to be apparent a lot of the time, as the server takes
care of each block to each person at a time.  Let's see, lets say the
machine gets 10k at a time off the disk.  Let's say your ftp supports
20k/sec.  This will all be thrown off if grind's net access is below a
certain point. 20 people @ 20k/sec=400k/sec for the drive=

					-- Soren

-- 
Soren Spies ------------------------"Straight outta Evanston"
sspies@dec1.eths.nwu.edu             Bulls WIN!!!!!
diskboy@aol.com                      Three-Peat 3 Pete Down in History.