Hard Disk Performance

From: IanC (ian.nospam_at_intech.co.uk)
Date: 05/19/04 

Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 08:28:27 +0100

We have a disk performance problem at some of our sites. Can anybody offer
any explanations.

We have about 250 SCO Openserver installations around the UK. All of the
installations run Openserver 5.0.2 on a variety of 'low spec' single CPU
PC's with IDE disks. The specs range from a 1998 266MHz Pentium with 2Gbyte
disk up to 1009MHz Pentium with 20Gbyte disk.

Some of the installations are taking much longer than others to run disk
intensive jobs.

Every night each system does a backup to a single disk file (Using Backup
Edge from Microlite). The single disk file is then copied to tape. We have
used the time taken to perform the backup to disk as a measure of the
systems disk performance. A typical backup size is 800Mbytes of data which
is compressed into a single backup file of 250Mbytes.

Our problem is that some sites take as little as 5 minutes to perform the
disk backup whilst others take over an hour. It is NOT the speed of the
processor or the spec of the disk drive which determines how long the
process take. Some older machines perform very well and some modern ones
perform badly.

We have taken two systems with a similar spec. One takes 10 minutes to
perform the backup. One take 30 minutes. We find that they have different
types of hard disk drive. (One is a 40Gbyte Western Digital and the other a
40GByte Samsung) If we swap the hard disk drive then the backup times move
with the hard disk. We have tried installing Linux on these two systems and
the backup times under Linux are fast on both machines - (6 minutes)

We have deduced that this may be some sort of driver problem which would be
solved by installing a new SCO disk driver (rather than the old one which is
in 5.0.2)

Has anybody got any thoughts on this and can anybody tell me if it is
possible to install the latest disk drivers onto 5.0.2. On the SCO web site
driver packages are only available for 5.0.6 and 5.0.7

Cheers

Ian

ian at intech dot co dot uk

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