On 09/24/97 19:00:24 you wrote:

If I had an F230 with, say, 6 drives, would I see any significant performance gain by placing 3 drives per shelf, rather than having all 6 drives on one shelf (and thus one controller)? This will be for heavily randomized file accesses (e.g., mail or news spool).

You might see a minor performance improvement. I think the last time this sort of thing was measured it was reported to be negligible, and didn't really appear until you had 4 or 5 drives on one controller. But this was with different controllers, different drives, etc. so it may no longer apply.

It probably can't hurt, and would certainly be worth trying. (Especially with random access... I suppose with a nice layout with good striping, it might be preferable to read it all from one controller at once... not sure how these things are handled at the low level.)

Bruce