Technology Shuffle

April 13th, 2008 | by Sean |

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some shuffling of my computer equipment. It’s been an interesting process to optimize everything.

Recently, I setup a 500GB mirrored array in valiant (an IBM PC Server 325 ; P2 300/192M). I found that in this configuration, I maximized at 10MBps writes to the array and 3.8MBps peak over FTP (GigE with 7936 byte MTU).

I moved the array into relax (P3 1GHz/1.2G) and am now getting 30MBps writes to the array and substantially better network performance (15MBps; but I need to rerun these tests as they were contaminated by a background fsck). Huge improvement! (I could probably achieve even better performance in a faster box). NFS still sucks, though.

I finally bought a new laptop - a 15″ MacBook Pro (2.4GHz variety). It’s tentatively called aparecium and it rocks. The old laptop, spiritfolk (an 800MHz Titanium PowerBook), is boxed and headed to California to assume new duty as my Mom’s laptop.

Other thoughts - I am likely retiring flyer (the kitchen iMac) and valiant in the near future. I’m slimming down the equipment as I optimize!

Braindump complete. You may now continue about your normal activity.

  1. 2 Responses to “Technology Shuffle”

  2. By ECH on Apr 14, 2008 | Reply

    Why did you buy the 2.4 ghz mbp when it has the santa rosa chip in it, verses the 2.5 mbp that I bought that has the penryn chip. True I needed the larger HD for 4 os’es that I am running but still the processor that you bought is slow and old vs a better instruction set that was added to the penryn chip to conserve battery power.

  3. By Sean on Apr 14, 2008 | Reply

    The 2.4GHz actually has a Core 2 Duo T8300 — which is part of the Penryn line.

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