I'm just curious. I have a super souped up Power Mac 7600 with a lot of upgrades -- maxed out RAM (1 GB), maxed out CPU (Sonnet Crescendo G4/1 GHz), Radeon 9200 PCI Graphics (128 MB VRAM), USB/FW card (USB is 2.0 speed in OS X) and a Sonnet Tempo HD PCI card that has an mSATA drive in an IDE adapter mounted on the card. It also connects to an external, 250 GB, 7200 RPM ATA/133 HDD. I'm posting with it now. Gotta love a site designed to play nicely with Classilla!
I can't max out much more short of getting an 8600 or 9600 carcass and getting more PCI slots.
Anyway.... I was wondering what the max theroetical disk throughput is on this model. In its current configuration the system bus is running at 50 MHz (this board can run at 40-50 MHz depending on the CPU to determine the multiplier, as far as I know). I am using Intech's QuickBench 2.0 in my OS 8/9 partitions (I have 7 systems ranging from 7.6.1 to Tiger installed) and testing on my two internal drives -- one an mSATA and the other a larger external IDE.
On the mSATA drive I am hitting a ceiling at around 34 MB/sec. On the spinner I am getting around 28-29 MB/sec. (By comparison, using the 4.5 GB SCSI Quantum Viking drive that came with this computer when I bought it, I have been getting around 8.5 to 8.8 MB/sec.)
When I run the OS X version of QuickBench 4.0 under Tiger, I'm doing worse -- around 23-24 MB/sec at best on the mSATA drive.
So I am wondering -- anyone know what the theoretical limit is for this motherboard? I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars chasing a bit of a performance upgrade on a hobby machine, but I am curious. I suspect I'm close to hitting the practical limit -- I can't imagine a SATA card would help much as I'm pretty sure the bus, not ATA/133, is the bottleneck here.