Would a dual core processor help me with this?

[George Macdonald]

As a bus, it beats SATA2 marginally (320MBytes/sec vs 300) and allows for
multiple drives per channel (and continues to with SAS, through expanders).

20MB/s is a pretty small nit and is going to need PCI-X or a 2-lane PCIe
card?

As a protocol, I'm not sure if the command queueing in SATA2 has caught up
with SCSI or not; the NCQ implementation through SATA1 drives was definitely
less powerful than the SCSI implementation.

Probably not but what SATA-II has does extend its reach up into previously
SCSI-only territory.

As for controllers, and this is not inherent to SCSI itself, they tend to do
a lot more offload from the processor. This can actually be disadvantageous
for raw bandwidth given how fast processor speeds are, but can be a big
advantage in terms of random access/transaction processing performance. This
is not as big an advantage with say a $150 Adaptec board or similar (or the
motherboard-integrated SCSI chips); also, many of the hardware RAID
SATA/SATA2 solutions (like 3ware sort of thing) have equally powerful
offload abilities to comparably priced SCSI solutions.

Processor load, as you say given modern CPU speeds, has not been a problem
for IDE since UDMA-33. More recently, one thing SCSI, as an add-in card,
cannot have is the integration into internal chipset data paths.

Also, in an earlier post, you mentioned "not counting 15k rpm sorts of
things" but of course that's part of the picture; for serious TP workloads,
those make a huge difference and as far as I know are still only available
for SCSI (though there's nothing inherent in that, just marketing - there's
little advantage for home users and a lot higher cost/lower capacity.)

Well yeah - big servers could benefit but the market for SCSI is shrinking
rapidly. In fact, in the workstation/small server, much of the continued
"recommendation" for it is based on myth & legacy folklore. In the context
of the current discussion, it seems like a red herring to me.

 

[George Macdonald]

Not SATA, but otherwise yes, that is how it is arranged.

Sorry abut that! Yes the drive dedicated to all the data copied from
DVDs is NTFS. The drive is ide DMA 6, NOT sata. I just checked it
and it was pretty fragmented, but the data is read off the drive by
both programs with no noticeable delay. To further clarify, when I do
my quarterly updates the entire folders are deleted before copying
begins. Of course, there could still be fragmentation from the other
database -- the subscriptions rarely arrive on the same day. There
are two databases -- one has relatively few very big files, the other
uses thousands of little files. Loading either database from new DVDs
causes the PC to behave about the same. The light on the DVD drive is
pretty much on all the time when copying either one . The DVD drive
is, I think, DMA2. For some reason, I suspect the DVD drive of being
the biggest hog but I will look in task manager next time UPS brings a
stack of discs.

Ok, as long as the NTFS volume was created with one of the M$ Format
methods it should be OK; if it was through Convert, there might be some
inefficiency but M$ is very vague about this, other than mentioning
creating an MFT before the Convert. Check that the allocation unit
(cluster) size is 4096 anyway - if you don't need compressed files, it
might be worth trying a bigger cluster size but it might not yield anything
and it's a PITA to do... due to lack of M$ tools. Paragon Partition
Manager has such a feature but I've never used that software.

I've found that the WinXP standard defragmenter needs running repeatedly to
get a "result" and even then it sometimes just won't "produce". I'd
certainly do a defrag just before the copy, after the delete, to make sure
dead file/folder entries are cleaned out. You could be right that the DVD
is the "hog" and has, of course, the slower transfer rate so it may be the
limiter.

When you build your new system, choose components carefully - there are
reports of problems with SATA2 with some drives and the nForce4 chipset,
though some of the complainers have subsequently admitted that their memory
was failing testing. At any rate, Seagate seems to be the best bet to get
a working SATA2, with *maybe* working NCQ. The SATA DVD drives have also
been problematic with nForce4 and Plextor doesn't seem inclined to work on
it.

For monitoring what's going on, as previously mentioned get Process
Explorer from www.sysinternals.com - more/better info than task manager.

Good luck with it.

 

[Raymond]

I wouldn't, that's how it's supposed to work normally, ie fairly
responsive.

Windows does time slicing per thread to make it seem as
if all is running at the same time on the same CPU. Depending
on the tasks being performed and thread priorities set, you
might get lower responsiveness. If it's freezing everything else,
first thing I'd check is the thread priorities of the process in
question using the Performance tool. If anything there is above Normal,
then I'd check the process base priority in Task Manager and
if higher than Normal, I would try lowering it to Normal.