Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:21559 alt.next:63
Path: utzoo!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,alt.next
Subject: Re: Speed of the Next disk, what kind of network?
Message-ID: <5632@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 14 Oct 88 17:29:02 GMT
References: <4XJKg9y00UgX0BFFR=@andrew.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 24
Bitch: I refuse to mix upper and lower case in words

It seems to me that with 8 Megs standard main memory, you shouldn't need to
touch the disk very often at all for most applications.  Multi-user databases
seem like the most troublesome applications in this respect.  For almost
everything else, just cache the entire file in RAM after doing a sequential
(front-to-back) transfer into memory.  Not too many seeks in that kind of
operation, at least until the disk becomes fragmented.

On thge other hand, page fault handling seems destined to be slow, unless the
head spends all its idle time in the page swapping area automatically.

I think the optical disk drive speed is probably quite liveable, especially
with every compute-bound task screaming away on the 25MHz 68030!

As pointed out, what's missing has been discussion of the external interfaces.
How many serial ports?  Any parallel ports?  Serial ports capable of LocalTalk
(nee Appletalk)?  Built-in Ethernet interface like the Suns it's being compared
to?  Everyone says it has NFS, but that's a higher protocol level than I'm
concerned about.  How well does it interface to the outside?
-- 
Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim
"In any religion or form of worship, followers should be allowed to think
for themselves.  In every religion that has a god other than Jesus Christ,
adherents are not allowed to think for themselves."
-- Lauren Stratford, "Satan's Underground"