carpio@questor.wimsey.bc.ca (antonio carpio) (06/04/90)
I recently purchased a 386SX computer with an IDE 80 meg Miniscribe drive, a a 1:1 interleave factor, 0.3 wait state, 2 meg RAM. In running some diagnostic tests, I got the following results: MIPS 1.91 Coretest - Data Transfer Rate 460 Kb/sec; Ave. seek 18.9; Track-Track Seek Seek 6.2; Overall performance 5.654. Speed 18.8 Mz. Can someone please tell me: (1) Are these good or bad results? (2) For the bad results, what may be the limiting factor? (3) Any suggestions on how to improve the performance? Thanks for any help you can offer.
root@kesher.UUCP (Aaron_Schmiedel) (06/04/90)
Your MIPS and Coretest ratings look pretty good. You may want to check your buss speed (if you have the Chips & Technology chip set) and try upping the speed on it a little. USUALLY (but there are many factors dependant) the data transfer rate should be around 600K - but that is under optimum conditions. At 460K, you are still doing a GREAT job compared to the standard MFM stuff. BUT, the IDE has on-board disk-caching (usually about 64K worth) so this shows as a significant speedup in Coretest. Those numbers are great, but remember the most important factor: Are you happy with the way it is performing?
shwake@raysnec.UUCP (Ray Shwake) (06/05/90)
In article <TXa9J1w162w@questor.wimsey.bc.ca> carpio@questor.wimsey.bc.ca (antonio carpio) writes: > MIPS 1.91 > Coretest - Data Transfer Rate 460 Kb/sec; Ave. seek 18.9; Track-Track Seek >Seek 6.2; Overall performance 5.654. Speed 18.8 Mz. Your results are typical for the class of machine under question, but I wouldn't take the Data Transfer Rate too seriously. Since you don't specify the block size used by Coretest, I assume you used the default (typically 32K or 64K); most real applications use far smaller block sizes (2K or less) with much less throughput. Coretest also reads only a single data stream many times, thus compounding the error. As far as increasing performance, adding software disk cache can often increase performance in real terms. I've used the smartdrv cache included with Windows to good effect, but many flavors of disk cache exist.