Linux IEEE1394 SBP2 - Benchmarking a 80GB 7200RPM IDE HD via Agere OHCI,
Ti PCILynx OHCI, and a VIA UDMA100 IDE controller
I recently bought a
CompuCable
525DX 5.25" IDE to Firewire HD enclosure and wanted to better understand
the performance impact by going IEEE1394 vs. native IDE. In addition to this,
I also had both an Agere OHCI FW PCI card as well as a machine that had a Ti
PCILynx OHCI controller on the motherboard. I wondered if they were
different. They ARE!
- The first graph shows the difference
between the two IEEE1394 controllers using the same IDE HD in the same
machine. The only variables are the FW controllers and also the use of the
EXT2, EXT3, and ReiserFS file systems just for good measure. All benchmarks
were run using HDPARM, Bonnie++, and dd read/writes.
- The second graph shows the same
benchmarks but now I added in the results from the on-board VIA UDMA100 IDE
controller directly connected to the same 80GB HD.
- Here is the original XLS spreadsheet
with the raw numbers and the Excel graphs that created the above PNG files.
- Here is the Bash script that I used to
automate this testing so you can easily run these benchmarks if you so wish.
Testing was run on the following:
- Mandrake 9.0 running a custom 2.4.20 kernel w/ the 02/14/03 FW1394 CVS treee
- MSI MS-6351 compact PC machine
- Intel 600Mhz Celeron CPU (66Mhz FSB)
- 512MB PC133 SDRAM
- CompuCable 525DX FW enclosure - Oxford 911 based - (supports 48bit addressing)
- Maxtor (Quantum) 80GB 7200RPM IDE HD
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Last Updated: 04/01/03
