IDG.net has a story about Hewlett-Packard working with CollabNet to host a worldwide developer site for HP employees.

– By Jeff Field –

With 15,000-RPM drives now on the market, the price of 10,000-RPM SCSI drives is sure to fall. This will allow
those looking for high-end performance to get what they want at a price that won’t break the bank. Today, I review
the latest generation of the first 10,000-RPM drive I can remember: Seagate’s 18-gigabyte Cheetah 36XL.The Seagate drive I’m testing today is the 18.2-gigabyte Ultra160 10,000 RPM Cheetah (ST318405LW). The drive
itself isn’t much different from most SCSI drives on the market now. The company claims the drive is 15 percent faster than earlier
models. There are two things that I remember about the first SCSI drive I had — a 9-gigabyte Seagate Barracuda: it was a half-height drive that needed lots of room for its large amount of heat, and it was loud. Performance has
come a long way since then. SCSI drives now, while not quite reaching the levels of IDE drives, are much quieter, smaller
and cooler than they used to be.

In some ways, SCSI has gotten the short end of the stick; while the drives are essentially the same as IDE, SCSI drives cost much more, relegating it to the role of a niche market player. It
takes someone with a very specific purpose in mind to justify paying nearly a thousand dollars for a SCSI drive that has
an equivalent IDE drive priced at $200. This is why SCSI drives are generally beyond the person building a PC for
personal use — most people simply don’t need it. Those who do, however, have many different drives to choose from, including this offering from Seagate. The sort of people who need SCSI are those who
have multiple disk drives performing many tasks at once. SCSI allows more
than one device to issue commands at the same time. In IDE drives, only one
command can be issued — say, a read command on a CD-ROM. This means that the
other devices have to wait for that command to be sent before they can go along
doing their own thing. In SCSI, multiple commands may be sent, making it much
more efficient for multitasking and having multiple drives.

Specs
Name	Cheetah 36XL
Model	ST318405LW
Form Factor	Low Profile
Formatted Capacity	18.352 Gigabytes
Platters	2
Spindle Speed	10,022 RPM
Interface	Ultra160

Thanks to the number of platters on this drive, it runs relatively quiet and cool. I was impressed, as the 36XL
is one of the few SCSI drives I have tested that are not hot to the touch, but rather just warm. I suspect,
with adequate empty space around it, the Cheetah 36XL could run quite reliably without the need for separate cooling. As for
noise, an important factor when picking a drive for a workstation, the 36XL is quiet for a SCSI drive — but not nearly as hushed as today’s average IDE storage devices, which
are at times practically inaudible. Normal operation causes noise that gets louder and then softer in a cycle. As
it turns out, this is a feature on these drives, thanks to a rotational
vibration sensor that monitors the vibration caused by
the presence of more than one active drive. The goal of this sensor is to stop
the drive from having to make another pass to pick up data missed due to excessive
vibration.

Performance
For those looking for the best combination of performance and capacity in SCSI drives, 10,000 RPMs would seem to be the
best market at this time. Presently, the faster 15,000 RPM drives only have small capacities, up to 18 gigabytes, while
10,000-RPM drives such as the 36XL can be found in sizes up to 73 gigabytes. If capacity is needed as well as
performance, the 10,000-RPM drives are going to be where you find such a combination, but just how fast is fast enough?

System Configuration
AMD Athlon 750
128 Megabytes PC133 SDRAM
3COM 3C905TX-B 10/100MB NIC
3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 AGP 16MB Video Board
Adaptec 3200s or 29160 32-BIT PCI SCSI Controller
Western Digital 10gb 7200 RPM WD102BA IDE HDD (boot/OS) (ext2)
Red Hat Linux 7.1 – Kernel 2.4.5 with Adaptec dpt_i2o patch
Seagate 18 gigabyte 10,000 RPM Ultra160 Cheetah Drives

bonnie++ results
Bonnie++ is a hard drive benchmark that tests the writing and reading
from both a single large file (such as that of a database) and many small files (like a proxy, or mail program). It is
useful for simulating performance under such applications.

Bonnie++ Results
Sequential Output
Controller	Per-Character	Block	Rewrite
Adaptec 3200s	8930 K/sec, 99% CPU	25991 K/sec, 34% CPU	8613 K/sec, 8% CPU
Adaptec 29160	9265 K/sec, 99% CPU	26562 K/sec, 48% CPU	7191 K/sec, 7% CPU
Sequential Input			Random
Controller	Per-Character	Block	Random
Adaptec 3200s	8234 K/sec, 79% CPU	31238 K/sec, 20% CPU	207.3 Seeks/sec, 1% CPU
Adaptec 29160	9753 K/sec, 89% CPU	36119 K/sec, 20% CPU	248.1 Seeks/sec, 2% CPU
Sequential Create
Controller	Create	Read	Delete
Adaptec 3200s	10528 /sec, 100% CPU	none	13189/sec, 99% CPU
Adaptec 29160	10415 /sec, 99% CPU	none	12844/sec, 100% CPU
Random Create
Controller	Create	Read	Delete
Adaptec 3200s	10137 /sec, 99% CPU	none	10090/sec, 90% CPU
Adaptec 29160	9724 /sec, 94% CPU	none	11215/sec, 99% CPU

The bonnie++ the results seem comparable to Seagate’s claims — for input, we see a speed of 36119K/sec, slightly
below the claimed speed of 43MB/sec. The read speed, for some reason, clocked in a bit lower at 26,562 or so, which may be
due to the way bonnie++ reads data, attempting to simulate database access.

hdparm results
The hdparm tests give you the raw throughput of the device — essentially, the best you can possibly hope for. Uncached is
the buffered speed of the disk, without the use of the operating system cache. Cached results test the perform of the RAM
and CPU more than they test the drive itself.

hdparm -t (Uncached) Results
Adaptec 3200s	36.47 MB/sec
Adaptec 29160	33.33 MB/sec
hdparm -T (Cached) Results
Adaptec 3200s	112.28 MB/sec
Adaptec 29160	111.30 MB/sec

Here we see the drive coming close to the rated 43MB/second, coming in at 33MB/sec on the 29160 controller and 36MB/second
on the 3200s. Even though the drive seems to perform slightly lower than advertised, it is still much faster than any
comparable IDE drive.

Conclusion
The Seagate 36XL is targeted for the workstation market, and is an excellent drive for its market. Odd
noises aside, the 36XL brings speed, quiet and reliability into one drive. With
a five-year warranty, Seagate makes it clear that these drives are built to last: The 36XL is a drive that is meant to run
reliably for extended periods of time. The only problem may be that
today’s workstations need more space than this specific 18-gigabyte model can offer, but the higher-capacity 36XL models
should perform at the same level, or even (in some cases) slightly better. If you are looking for an affordable SCSI hard drive, the 18-gigabyte is available for $225 on Price
Watch. In the market for 10,000-RPM drives, you’re not going to find any drives that blow each other out of the
water, so the real tests are all about price and reliability. If you’re in need of SCSI storage, the 36XL is a choice that
performs well for a decent price.

The latest edition of Tcl news and links are now posted at Linux Weekly News: “Jean-Luc Fontaine announces tclperl version 2.3″ … ” R. D. Findlay inspires a brief discussion about Tk and embedded
Linux systems” … “Brent Welch maintains “The Tcl Developer Xchange”, a highly
organized resource center of documents and software with
provisions for individuals to “set up a link to your software
and update … as you release new versions.””

From a press release at Linux Weekly News: “The GnuCash Development Team
http://www.gnucash.org> proudly announces the release of GnuCash 1.6,
the GNU personal finance manager. GnuCash features a full account
hierarchy manager, a checkbook-like register GUI to enter
transactions, and a full set of reports to visualize the state of your
finances. The new release comes with a configurable main window, a
much improved checking and general ledger entry window, and over ten
completely new graphical reports including pie charts and bar charts
using the GNU plot program Guppi http://www.gnome.org/guppi>.”

eWEEK: ” Oracle Corp. rolls out its Oracle9i database this week, it will
boast some 450 new or improved features over its predecessor, 8i.
Though early testers are impressed with the software, it won’t
necessarily be smooth sailing for the database king, as competition
heats up and users ponder whether to upgrade.”

Interactive Week: “HP’s new Internet Server, introduced last week, will be given away to all comers, including competitors, in the company’s bid to get builders
of Web services to follow its technology lead and to get back into a
leadership role in both the Java and Web services communities.

Internet Server moves beyond the typical Web server – whether open
source Apache or Microsoft Internet Information Server, which
primarily serve up HTML pages – but stops short of trying to be a
commercial application server – such as Sun Microsystems’ iPlanet or
BEA Systems’ WebLogic, which provide many database services and
connection services beyond the Web connection.”

The Los Ageles Times reports: “For at least 17 days at the height of the energy crisis,
hackers mounted an attack on a computer system that is integral to the movement
of electricity throughout California, a confidential report obtained by The Times
shows.
The hackers’ success, though apparently limited, brought to light lapses in
computer security at the target of the cyber-attack, the California Independent
System Operator, which oversees most of the state’s massive electricity
transmission grid.”

eWEEk reports on a major disagreement brewing over the actual Linux server market share. Gartner Dataquest recently reported that just 8.6 percent of 3Q 2000 servers sold were Linux-based, 93 percent of that number shipped with Red Hat’s Linux distribution. Rival research group IDC, however, has numbers slighly different, showing Linux with 27 percent of the total server market. Interesting data point: The Gartner survey was sponsored by Microsoft.

eWEEK: “Although it was created by a phone maker and aimed at the cellular
phone industry, the short-range wireless protocol called Bluetooth is
now finding more of a home in devices for the enterprise.

While the shift from phone to peripheral device has vexed the big cell
phone makers, which happen to be the largest backers of the
technology, it could bode well for enterprise users eyeing Bluetooth
for commercial applications.”

Pasadena, Paris, 11th June 2001 – In response to the
ever growing user
demand, MandrakeSoft announces today the
availability of the Beta1
version of Mandrake Linux PPC, based Mandrake Linux
8.0.MandrakeSoft and Apple follow the same philosophy: to offer the most user-friendly and easy-to-use solution. Thanks to Mandrake Linux PPC 8.0, the widely acclaimed Mandrake Linux distribution is now available for PowerPC G3 and G4.

Mandrake Linux PPC Beta 1 features:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/ppc.php3

Mandrake Linux PPC Beta 1 will be available for
download in few hours on
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/ftp.php3