[ExtractStream] More questions....

[Roger Merchberger]

--- Michael Loftis <mloftis@w...> wrote:

> Is this where I give you a case of computer envy? :) Yah I may as
> well.

We'll see... ;-)

> I have an AMD Athlon XP1800+ (1.5something Ghz),

Yea, but do you have (2) of 'em??? The MP's are a little more
internally optimized then the XP, from what I read on
tomshardware.com, and TMPGenc can max both of 'em...

> 5xUltra80 10KRPM drives 
> chained to a two channel ICP Vortex GDT6528RS setup in RAID0
> (Striping) for best performance,

Well, I have dual Ultra160 on the motherboard, it's non-raid. That
doesn't stop me from mongospeed in Linux using software raid, but
that doesn't help me much in Win2K where I do my video schtuff...
<sniff>

> I peak out at about 80MBYTE/sec with 100% CPU usage (read 
> and/or write -- total throughput).

I was getting about 60-65 MByte/sec w/3 9Gig drives striped under
linux, but methinks that was a limitation of the software raid, as
the CPU wasn't quite taxed... I'd like to see what software vs.
hardware raid would do with a drive setup like yours...

> 512MB PC2100 rounds it out (I wanna go to 1Gb but too poor) ... 

Just 1G? I have the same monetary limiting factors as you, but my
mobo will let me go to 3.5G when I want to... :-)

> Just 
> built this system less than 6 months ago, I had the RAID controller
> from..uhm I'm not sure where but I had it sitting, and drives were
> just idling in one of the servers I have here.
> 
> A good dose of SCSI and RAID seriously helped my video editing and 
> splitting. The TiVo extraction is still the most god-awfully
> slowest part of the process.

Yea, if only we could get that poor little 53Mhz PPC in the tivo to
push a gigabit adapter... ;-)

Considering that (at least for what I do with my setup) HD speed
isn't the limiting factor, I dunno if I'd trade the dual CPU setup
for hardware raid... even with my 7200 RPM IDE drive, the kernel CPU
usage rarely & barely hits 10% on either CPU, with an average of
about 3%... Offshifting 3-5% HD load versus bumping to 3.46Ghz (a
pair of 2100+MPs would definately make my mouth water) methinks I'd
allocate the $$$ for the latter first.

Altho you definately did give my drive envy... :-)

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

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