Summary
Disks are faster than ever
Disks easily outrun HP’s slow SCSI interface
Physical disk geometry has little to do with optimal file system geometry
Disktabs, while not required in HP-UX 10.x, are still useful
Notes:
This is the 7th year that this presentation has been given, and not only are the current drives are significantly faster than last year’s, but the speed of the SCSI buses available on the latest HP workstations has doubled.
As shown by the tests, it is rare for the current generation of disk drives to transfer data slower than 5MB/sec, which is the “factory-shipped” maximum rate of the HP single ended core SCSI bus.
As shown in the charts, drives with 8 to 10 heads (4 or 5 platters) perform better when the host computer is told that they have 25 or more heads, and when it is told that they have at least 37 to 50 sectors per track.
Using these benchmark results it is possible to “dial in” I/O performance that is easily 10 to 20% faster than that provided by HP’s newdisk utility.