Re: More space on a 170? Other ways to speed it up?

[Al Mac <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I work on a 170 that has 6 drives, we're at about 65%.

Check the CPU ... you can get faster processors ... it is like replacing 
the motherboard on a PC, except with IBM, the memory, processors, etc. are 
different ingredients.

Depending on the application, archiving recent history transactions can 
have dramatic effect. Here's one of the BPCS solutions to that.  There are 
others.
http://www.unbeatenpathintl.com/locksmith_bpcs/source/1.html

Prior to the latest OS/400 version, you could not backup spool files, but 
there's 3rd party shareware paths to getting reports off of spool and onto 
some other media.  I'd lover to have all our end month reports for each 
fiscal period, on a set of CDs or something, that can be read by both 400 
and non-400.

As we move to later OS versions, stuff happens, that can disrupt 
performance.  Solution is not just getting various PTFs, but examining the 
load.  I managed to move a bunch of tasks from interactive to JOBQ, 
identifying reports that people need each morning, arranging to have them 
run from GO CMDSCDE so they ready when folks show up each morning.  I 
experimented with how many different JOBQ could be running concurrently, 
without imparing performance (slim results).

There is also performance tuning.  That's almost rocket science.  You need 
to get IBM education and books on the subject.

> Fellow geeks:
>
> The neighbor for whom we did the memory upgrade this past
> weekend might possibly be interested in more disk space,
> and/or anything else that might make the system a bit
> peppier. The memory upgrade should help a bit (it
> increased available memory fivefold), and we also advised
> them to do something about the thousands of spool files
> sitting in output queues, but I'm hoping there's more.
>
> The box in question is a "slim" 170, and all 4 drive slots
> are taken up by (I believe) 6713s. No mirroring, and so
> far as I'm aware, no parity groups, either, and the drives
> are all at around 55%.
>
> Are there bigger and/or faster drives available for a 170?
> Other ways to make the system run faster?
>
> --
> JHHL