Apple

Hi. I've just aquired a dual 867mhz g4 (mirrored doors). It seems to have ata100 as its fastest disk speed. But it does have gigabit networking. So my question is, should I boot from the internal ata100 drive and nfs everything else (on a gigabit network)? Will I get a performance gain? I don't really want to put much more money into it (for a pci-x scsi / sata card) unless I find a compatible one for a low price.
Thanks in advance.

Keep in mind that there's speed and there's latency and you have to look at them both together. ATA100 ain't super fast, but it doesn't have to go through quite so many layers.

The ATA100 interface is (up to) 100 MByte/sec. Convert bits to bytes and you'll see that a gigabit network interface is only 125 MByte/sec. That's not much of an improvement. And that's before factoring in the network overhead that SAQ mentions, too!

It's also important to realize that 100 MByte/sec is the maximum burst speed of the ATA100 interface. It's very unlikely that the disk can actually sustain anything anywhere near that. Look up the manufacturer's specs for your brand/model of disk and see what its sustained transfer rate is. You might be able to find a compatible replacement disk that is noticeably faster. Or, if your disk is really slow and you've got fast a RAID in your NFS server, then NFS might be faster despite the above caveats.

Ok. Thanks for the info. I will leave the ata drive in for now. Maybe I will come across a compatible pci-x card for sata or scsi.

Kind of a buzzkill, but do keep in mind what you will actually be doing with the machine. Does it need to have a better disk interface? Will you really be transferring that much data and/or making use of applications where command queuing will make a significant difference? Do you need more than the max disk size for ATA100? If so but it isn't that often than NFS may be a good solution that's a bit less trouble/expense than getting a compatible SATA/SAS/SCSI card. If not than as-is ATA100 might work just fine.

Yeah, I don't think I'll need much more than the ata100 bus. I got the g4 / monitor for a very good price. The only reasons I'd be using it is just to have a mac desktop and for osx coding / porting. Just thought I'd look into increasing the speed because I like upgrading things, lol.

bradbobak wrote: Yeah, I don't think I'll need much more than the ata100 bus. I got the g4 / monitor for a very good price. The only reasons I'd be using it is just to have a mac desktop and for osx coding / porting. Just thought I'd look into increasing the speed because I like upgrading things, lol.

Considering that at best you'll be running OS X 10.5, and that PPC applications haven't been usable on Intel for a long time (since 10.7 came out), how much porting/coding are you actually going to be able to do? I struggle to find things that will run on 10.6 on Intel these days, much less for PPC...