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