hamachi@KIM.BERKELEY.EDU (Gordon Hamachi) (04/21/86)
I went to ComputerWare in Palo Alto today and ran a disk benchmark program
called "DiskBench3". It reads and writes 32K blocks, and comes up with three
measures: read time, write time, and access time. It isn't at all clear that
the benchmark measures the right thing, but it does tell you something.
I measured a number of hard disks and floppy disks:
Disk Read Write Access Advertised Price
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Data Frame 20 1336 1401 463 $895
LoDown 10 1495 1507 305 $695
Paradise Mac 20 7451 8063 (failed) ?
DataSpace 800K floppy 8583 12049 (failed) $267
MicroTech 800K floppy 7296 10887 (failed) ?
Notes: The Paradise drive is little faster than a floppy disk! It works
through the serial port rather than the SCSI port. It was
tested on a Mac 512K with the old 64K ROMs, while all others
were tested on a Mac Plus.
The LoDown 10 was noticably noisier than the Data Frame 20.
Computerware says the LoDown 20 should be faster than the LoDown 10.
"Coming soon": MD Ideas 20 meg scsi hard disk, $895 advertised price.
RAM disks seem to be an order of magnitude faster than the fastest
SCSI hard disks.
Use these numbers for comparison only. Your mileage may vary.
Disclaimer:
I am not in any way associated with any computer store or any disk
manufacturer.
--Gordon Hamachi