[PLUG] CDR speedup - observations

AthlonRob AthlonRob at axpr.net
Wed Feb 25 07:42:02 UTC 2004


On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 01:47, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> BTW, two 52X CDR drives seem to work just about as fast as a single
> drive, on a 1.8GB P4 / ATA133 / Rambus machine.  I wonder how many
> drives and IDE controllers one could stuff in a Linux box before it
> started slowing down?

You could do the math... 33MHz, 32-bit PCI bus... you'll run in to a
slowdown when you saturate the PCI bus.

With DMA enabled on the drives, they certainly don't eat a lot of CPU
while burning.  However, you need to be able to feed them data fast
enough so as to not incur buffer underruns.  If you're burning off a
single hard disk to fifteen CD-R drives, you'll find your hard disk
cannot feed that many drives fast enough.  Again, you could probably do
a little math... I think the faster (consumer-grade) hard drives out
there are able to sustain around 30MB/sec read speeds.

Aside from actual hardware speed limitations, I'm not sure where any
software bottlenecks would occur... especially if you're using 2.6.

My two cents...

Rob





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