Would a PCI SCSI Card Help the Stock Drive?
You may have wondered if a PCI UW SCSI Card would have helped the OEM SCSI disk – the answer is no as noted in an 9600 onboard vs PCI SCSI article, a PCI Card actually resulted in lower performance with this drive (and most narrow SCSI drives). (Frank Bernier later followed up with his own tests with faster narrow SCSI drives and came to the same conclusion.) The onboard SCSI seems to run higher IOs/sec than the PCI Card and when used with drives that are not capable of exceeding its 10MB/sec limit, it is faster than a PCI Card. In Finder level tests I performed awhile back I saw little difference between *finder copy performance* with a B&W G3 IDE drive and a 10K RPM U2 Cheetah and U2 SCSI card. See my U2 SCSI Cards review for more info. Finder Performance Tests: The table below lists comparison times for startup, launching Photoshop 5 and opening a 4.41MB (disk file size) sample image. Note that with 320MB of RAM, the memory test takes most of the startup time and is not affected by
