HP Vectra XW Optimization Manual page 34

1 Your Personal Workstation's Performance Features
Increasing the Speed Limit With Ultra SCSI
When your system writes data to a particular SCSI hard disk drive, that
data passes from the integrated SCSI controller to a buffer on the disk
drive. The drive then transfers the data from the buffer on to the disk.
Before transferring more data to the disk drive buffer, the integrated
SCSI controller must wait until the previous data has been transferred
on to the disk.
By using disk striping, the integrated SCSI controller can avoid this
wait, by making the next data transfer to the next disk drive in the
striping group. Before transferring more data to the first drive, the
controller will transfer data to each of the other drives in the striping
group. Because successive data transfers are to different drives, the
time between data transfers to any individual drive is increased and so
the delaying effect of the buffer-to-disk transfer is removed.
NOTE To enable disk striping on a group of hard disk drives, all the drives in
the group must be of identical type and capacity. Enabling striping on a
group of disks of different types may produce unexpected results.
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