Hi Neil > Right about what? I don't think that anything that I wrote can > reasonably be interpreted to say that you can just use one channel > without losing performance. > > I said "If ... the devices handles the required parallelism". I don't > know much in detail about IDE (I use SCSI mostly) but if it is true > that you cannot talk to a slave and a master at the same time, then > the drives DO NOT handle the required parallelism, so you don't get > any parallelism. > It is basically completely out of md's hands. It won't get in the way > of parallelism, but it won't make it magically happen if the > drives/controller/drivers cannot make it happen. > > Is that any clearer? Or did I misunderstand you. yes, I think I misunderstood first. sorry for that. :-) I found that some discussion in hardware forums that if UDMA is enabled, the IDE channel can attach two drivers with a little performance leakage. I only tested it with one dvdrw and one dvdrom which attach in the same channel. The kernel is 2.6 and hdparm -d1 enabled. When I use growisofs isos to dvdrw and copy data from dvdrom, both of them would slow down for transfer. So, I think the IDE isn't parallelism at all. It's better to plug one driver in an IDE channel. I hope I am not wrong? Although the IDE and SCSI are different at many perspectives, e.g. SCSI devices are capable to read/write in the same channel(parallelism). I still wonder if IDE can do it. The IDE cables become a mess while many disks in a box. :-( Thanks for reply. Asho Yeh -- ~ Asho Yeh <asho@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 'v' GnuPG-Key ID: 1CC92D7F // \\ Fingerprint: 192B 76FD 5643 6EE7 3DEC 9EAF 3088 48D2 1CC9 2D7F /( )\ ^`~'^ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html