Checking the host system

The faster the host, the faster your transfer times are. The work flow goes only as fast as the slowest connection in the host system, so transferring data from an IDE drive, 100Mb connection, a DLT 4000, a high speed RAID volume across the country, or other applications, slows the system no matter how fast everything else is in the system.

1Verify that the iSCSI storage adapter or NIC is connected to the fastest PCI bus connector supported by the adapter or NIC.

If the adapter supports PCI-X, place the adapter in a PCI-X slot. If one is not available, the host might not achieve the optimal performance capable from the adapter.

Even placing a PCI-X adapter into a 64 bit 66 MHz slot loses performance. Some adapters

adjust clock speed depending on the speed of the PCI slot into which they are plugged.

2The host OS disk and swap disk/partition/file should be on a high speed drive such as a SCSI drive to minimize the time needed to access the host’s virtual memory.

The more memory a system has, the less time it spends accessing virtual memory (hard drive space).

Checking the Operating System

If possible, eliminate swap space and virtual drives which require large amounts of system memory. However, the OS might not allow the elimination of swap space. An OS set to run many kinds of different servers spends much of its CPU cycle on other operations, thus slowing down performance.

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ATTO Technology 2500C operation manual Checking the host system