Some assembly required…

I was beginning to run out of disk space so since I needed to buy some new disks I thought I might as well try to see if using software RAID on the Mac Pro was worth it.

So I bought two 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 rpm drives and formatted them for RAID usage. I selected 64K block size – I think default was 32K.

Next I copied my boot drive to the RAID setup using Carbon Copy Cloner and made the new RAID my new boot disk. There seems to be some confusion wether or not you can boot from a RAID drive – I do it now so I guess you can.

The old boot drive was a standard drive supplied by Apple – a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB . I tested it using Xbench 1.3:

Disk Test	48.12
Sequential	86.64
Uncached Write	82.30	50.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	82.89	46.90 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	86.32	25.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	96.43	48.46 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random	33.31
Uncached Write	11.15	1.18 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	91.24	29.21 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	90.87	0.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	119.29	22.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Disk Test	120.21
Sequential	182.63
Uncached Write	305.03	187.28 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	323.33	182.94 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	78.29	22.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	362.56	182.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random	89.59
Uncached Write	31.76	3.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	353.19	113.07 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	170.70	1.21 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	223.48	41.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]

So quite a bit faster at least according to Xbench. I also measured cold-boot times until the Quicksilver logo appears. Before: 2 minutes. After: 41 seconds. Nice!

The server that is hosting this blog have had some rough times lately – and it all ended with the postal service destroying it! But luckily it lives on with new hardware in a brand new location!

Hopefully it will stay safe and sound for a long time…

The GDROM drive in the Dreamcast in my arcade cabinet is sometimes making unhealthy squeaking noises. That made me think about that when the GDROM eventually dies the Dreamcast is pretty much useless – and getting spare parts will continue getting harder.

Recently I got a new found interest in electronics after realizing what you can do nowadays with FPGAs and microcontrollers. I think it all started when I read about the Minimig – awesome project!

So I started toying around with the idea of replacing the GDROM drive with something else – a hard drive, connection to a PC or maybe a flash card. I did some googling and realized I wasn’t alone with that idea. A good thing is that the gdrom electronics are on a separate board which connects to the Dreamcast motherboard. Therefore it should be easy to replace at least physically.

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