Western Digital Ethernet Cards

[dave himes]

Doug McCallum writes:

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> ............ Bunch of stuff deleted .................
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>ISC will have full driver support for the EP in the near future.
>
>Doug McCallum
>Interactive Systems Corp.
>dougm at ico.isc.com


What do you mean by full support?  

I've received some supplemental network drivers for ico 2.2.1 that 
support the "WD EtherCard Plus" family of network cards;  this 
includes the 8013ep ("EtherCard Plus Elite16 is what my package says) 
and the WD Token Ring card.

My question is, I didn't really notice any performance improvements over
the 8bit board.  The tests I ran where just "timed" rcp's, ftp's and
nfs copy's from a SparcStation 2 to a Dell 325.  The transfer rates where
nearly identical for both the 8bit board and the 16bit board.  The only 
benefit that I could see is that the 16bit WD card allowed me to use 
8k rsize and wsize's on the "mounts" where the 8bit card could only 
handle a 4k rsize and wsize (and I attributed that to more memory on 
the 16bit card).

Are there further driver improvements yet to be made to the WD drivers or
are the drivers getting the most out of the 16bit board.



--

David Himes                            himes at ncar.ucar.edu
UCAR-COMET
Boulder, CO