balzer@frambo.enet.dec.com (Christian Balzer) (08/07/89)
[Do line-eaters dream of electric sheep?] Hi folks, Looking at the latest and greatest revision of my HD controller review, I couldn't help but to notice that most of my data is rather old and does not include the most recent developments in the HD controller arena (with the notable exception of the A590). Since I'm a firm believer in audience partici-pation (Rocky Horror insider joke :-), I hereby ask all of you out there to become my willing slaves or at least pass me your Diskperf/Devspeed results. :-) What follows is the scenario in which I would like you to do your tests, but I'm happy about any input from you and the form below will allow you to exactly state your environment. Prefered test environment: KS/WB 1.3, a freshly formatted FFS partition of at least 4 MB size, Workbench screen (4 colors) in front, system in 68000 mode, no more than 20 buffers or additional caching programs. There should be no "real" background activity (like a compiler) and the priority of the CLI/Shell in which the test program runs should be 0 for the first run and 4 or higher for the second test. One program I would like you to run during the tests is Perfmon by Dale Luck. It can be found on your Extras disk. Please run it at full size and at full speed. The output will tell you (and me) how hard the CPU has to work to get the data in, do directory scans, etc. Rough estimates like "The sucker ate about an additional 50% during read/write compared to idle running" are OK. If you have a different CPU or use a caching program I would also love to hear from you, but it would be especially nice if you could give me results without those features, too. Here's a nice little form to fill out: ------------------- System: (A1000,A2000,A500) CPU: (plain 68000 or type of CPU/board) Memory: (How much chip/fast mem? How much 32bit wide memory?) Display: (PAL/NTSC, # of bit-planes, screen size) OS: (What Kickstart/Workbench) Activity: (What else was going on in your system? Priority of test CLI) CPU-Drain: (How bad does HD I/O hurt your system performance? Perfmon!) Caching: (number of buffers, cache program & parameters) FileSystem: (Old FS or Fast File System for now) Partition: (size, how full, how badly fragmented?) Controller: (guess what? ;-) Please also note your driver version) Hard Disk: (Type of HD, interface, blocks per track, etc.) Testprogram: (Which program did ya use? Diskperf/Devspeed? What version?) Results: (What did that program tell ya?) ------------------- BTW, I will not pass your data to the IRS, a junk mail list or use it it any commercial way. Just that ya know... Depending on your input, the next revision of my HD controller review will be posted to c.s.a within the next two to three weeks. If you have some more comments on your setup than just raw numbers, I like to hear those, too. And for the neccessary ego boosting, all submitters will be listed in the next review. How about that for imortality? :-) Many, I mean MANY, thanks in advance for your efforts, - <CB> P.S. Could some kind soul please send me a working version of Devspeed by Cltd. (incl. source) and the Blitzdisk-II patch? Thanks! -- _ _ / / | \ \ <CB> aka Christian Balzer - The Software Brewery - // < < |-< > decwrl!frambo.dec.com!CB | unido!decum!frambo.dnet!CB // \ \_ |_/ / I-Net: CB@frambo.enet.dec.com | E-Net: FRAMBO::BALZER \\ // ------------ PMail: Im Wingertsberg 45, D-6108 Weiterstadt, F.R.G. \X/