Author: Brian Lee Page: 6

Now that the CPU was taken care of, the next thing to tackle was the disk subsystem.  The basic configuration came with a 20 gig 7200 rpm hard disk which I decided to replace with an older but still reliable 20 gig 7200 rpm HD.  Yes, this sounds stupid, but I had another system that could use the newer and faster hard drive.  The boot/application hard drive on the server didn't need to be really fast, just reliable.  Here are pictures of the IBM hard drive I installed on the server.

For the data drives, I decided to go with two Maxtor D740X 80 gig hard drives in RAID 1 configuration.  I choose the Maxtor drives because they are fast, quiet, and have liquid bearings.  Not the cheapest 80 gig drives out there, but very good.  These drives are one of the few ATA133 drives out there.  Not that you'll see any real difference between ATA133 or ATA100.  But what about ATA133 versus ATA66?  Also, since the 500SC has 64 bit 66 Mhz PCI slots, would there be a difference between that and a standard 32 bit 33 MHz, PCI bus?

The reason I ask this question is because I had an older Fasttrack 66 laying around which uses a 32 bit 33 Mhz PCI slot.  I installed this card with the Maxtor drives and did some benchmarks to see how this card performed. 

Here is the Fasttrack 66 card in a regular 32 bit 33 Mhz PCI slot.

In the meantime, I did some research and looked for a RAID card that could support ATA133 and work in a 64 bit 66 Mhz PCI slot.  I found that the Promise TX2000 card did exactly this.  Promise Technologies was kind enough to send us a TX2000 to use in our server and compare with the Fasttrack 66. 

Here are the two Maxtor 80 gig 7200 rpm drives.  Time to stuff the drives and cables into the case.

The two drives will reside behind these two 3.5 inch bay covers.  In order to do this, we need to take the whole drive bay assembly out.

Unscrew this little screw and then slide out the bay.

I'll put the drives in from the backside.

One drive in.

Two drives in.

There we go, everything is tucked in nice and tight!

Now with both cards in hand, I did some testing to compare the Fasttrack 66 against the TX2000 on a regular 32 bit 33 Mhz slot and also in 64 bit 66 Mhz slot.  Here are the results, again using Sandra Sisoft.  I know some of you are going to complain that I didn't use some other hard drive benchmarking software, but since this isn't a full on review of hardware, I was happy to just get a rough idea of how the hardware performed.

I first compared the Fasttrack66 against the TX2000 in a 32 bit 33 Mhz PCI slot.
 

Okay, so using the same hard drives and the same 32 bit 33 Mhz PCI slot, the TX2000 is slightly faster than the Fasttrack 66.  However, the difference is not all that large.

Once I got that test out of the way, I was interested in testing the TX2000 in a 32 bit 33 Mhz PCI slot versus a 64 bit 66 Mhz PCI slot.  Here are the results.
 

Whoa! The scores for the 64 bit slot are lower than those for the 32 bit slot.  Why is this?  I have no idea.  I repeated the tests just to make sure and the 32 bit slot was still faster.  Then again, this is just one benchmark.  In different benchmarks, the results may be different.  Nonetheless, I left the TX2000 in the 64 bit 66 Mhz PCI slot.
 

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