ncreed@ndsuvax.UUCP (W. Reed) (12/19/88)
I recently purchased the Pioneer removable hard disk system
after drooling over it for months. Since I thought someone
might be interested in how it performs.
Configuration: A1000 512K
CLtD controller version 3.0 SCSIDOS
FastFileSystem
The drive has 2 sides, 34 blocks / track, with 1273 tracks.
It comes with interleave set to 1:1. Pioneer does a lowlevel
format on all disks they ship out. It came with 2.01 version
of CLtD's software, so I had to DL the new version.
One irritation is that neither Pioneer or CLtD has enough in-
formation on low level formatting.
Diskperfa results (using 5896 byte version that came with
SCSIDOS 2.01)
File create/delete: create 11 files/sec, delete 18 files/sec
Directory scan: 102 entries/sec
Seek/read test: 100 seek/reads per second
r/w speed: buf 512 bytes, rd 68985 byte/sec, wr 62415 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 4096 bytes, rd 93622 byte/sec, wr 67216 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 8192 bytes, rd 93622 byte/sec, wr 70849 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 32768 bytes, rd 93622 byte/sec, wr 72817 byte/sec
Diskperfa was run on an empty FFS partition.
I am disappointed with the read speed as I feel it could be better.
My thoughts are that the interleave could be changed for better
results (as mention in the Amazing Computing article V3 #11 p69.)
The case that comes with the drive (if you buy it that way) is
nice. It even has a handle for portability. The SCSI cable is
about 2' long and uses a 50 pin centronics for the drive end.
There is only space in it for the one 1/2 hight drive though.
The drive has a 15 second spin up time so backing up onto another
removable disk would be slow (unless you use a large ram: disk for
temporary area and swap.)
My reasons for buying the drive were that I would probably buy a
large fixed disk in the future and this would be ideal for high speed
backup as well as providing me with plenty of storage now.
hope this is of interest to someone. BTW, I will only be at this
net address until Dec 23. My Email should be forwarded though.
--
------ Walter Reed ------ + uunet!ndsuvax!ncreed or ncreed@ndsuvax.BITNET
"There's no point in being + or ncreed@plains.NoDak.edu
grown up if you can't be +
childish sometimes!" Dr. Who + USnAIL: 925 9th Ave W. West Fargo, ND 58078
#! rnews