Classic running out of memory... huh? what? <long>

[Jarod Wilson]

On Jun 11, 2009, at 3:25 PM, Lloyd Kvam wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 13:41 -0400, bruce.labitt at autoliv.com wrote:
>> I bet it won't do 480Mbits sustained.
>> (For a 10 GB file write) However, I just might try it for the heck of
>> it!
> I use external USB and firewire drives fairly regularly.  USB does not
> come close to achieving 48 MB / sec.  Firewire (400 mb flavor) does
> noticeably better than USB.
>
> Would dd from /dev/zero to /dev/sdX would be a reasonable way to
> benchmark the interface at the expense of any data on the drive?

Its a decent enough baseline for raw sequential write throughput.

> (I suppose higher quality hardware might do better.

There are definitely some FireWire chipsets that perform better than  
others, but typically nothing orders of magnitude better than anything  
else. Don't know any USB chipsets well enough to comment there.

In the FireWire disk realm, try to stick to Oxford bridges. Cheaper  
ones from Initio and Prolific often are often just that: cheaper. And  
less robust, and lower performance, etc. Host side, there's not a huge  
difference from one controller to another anymore until you start  
really loading up the bus with devices, but Texas Instruments and  
Agere (now LSI) are typically considered the best options[1].

[1] http://www.ptgrey.com/support/kb/index.asp?a=4&q=146&ST=controller

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com