svermeulen@Janus.MRC.AdhocNet.CA (Steve Vermeulen) (12/15/88)
u!Hello All, Well I have just finished hooking up a CONNER PERIPHERIALS CP3100 drive to my 2090 (not an "A") card. This is a 104Meg drive in a 3.5inch half height form factor with a SCSI interface (with a 16K byte buffer). It is quite low power with a typical consumption of 7W. It is also extremely quiet, in fact even with the cover off the 2000 I could not hear the drive working! During installation I had two problems: 1) Neither the SCSI connector nor the technical manual for the drive identified pin #1 of the SCSI connector, one phone call to CONNER sorted that one out. Pin #1 is the closest pin to the power connector. 2) The PREP command took something like 2 minutes (well it felt like that long - I didn't time it!) to do its stuff! Because of this I actually 3 finger saluted the machine several times thinking it had crashed during the prep and reopened the case and inspected everything again... Question: Why does PREP take soooo longgggg? Now that I have got it formatted I decided to run the classic Diskperf test from Fish Disk #48. In the following note that the Seagate ST251-1 test was done on a partition that has seen extensive use for about 6 months since its last format and is typically 80-90% full, so is perhaps a realistic speed value for that drive, whereas the CONNER test was on a brand new, freshly formatted partition. 2090 Card with Seagate 251-1 drive (fastfilesystem) File create/delete: create 8 files/sec, delete 33 files/sec Directory scan: 98 entries/sec Seek/read test: 112 seek/reads per second r/w speed: buf 512 bytes, rd 74898 byte/sec, wr 27887 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 4096 bytes, rd 124830 byte/sec, wr 109226 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 8192 bytes, rd 163840 byte/sec, wr 131072 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 32768 bytes, rd 218453 byte/sec, wr 145635 byte/sec 2090 Card with CONNER CP3100 drive (fastfilesystem) File create/delete: create 16 files/sec, delete 55 files/sec Directory scan: 106 entries/sec Seek/read test: 127 seek/reads per second r/w speed: buf 512 bytes, rd 81920 byte/sec, wr 28807 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 4096 bytes, rd 291271 byte/sec, wr 145635 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 8192 bytes, rd 327680 byte/sec, wr 218453 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 32768 bytes, rd 655360 byte/sec, wr 238312 byte/sec RAM: disk (WorkBench 1.2) File create/delete: create 5 files/sec, delete 9 files/sec Directory scan: 5 entries/sec Seek/read test: 52 seek/reads per second r/w speed: buf 512 bytes, rd 201649 byte/sec, wr 124830 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 4096 bytes, rd 655360 byte/sec, wr 218453 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 8192 bytes, rd 873813 byte/sec, wr 238312 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 32768 bytes, rd 873813 byte/sec, wr 238312 byte/sec VDK: disk (Early release from Pacific Cypress) File create/delete: create 7 files/sec, delete 90 files/sec Directory scan: 78 entries/sec Seek/read test: 257 seek/reads per second r/w speed: buf 512 bytes, rd 201649 byte/sec, wr 79437 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 4096 bytes, rd 655360 byte/sec, wr 109226 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 8192 bytes, rd 655360 byte/sec, wr 113975 byte/sec r/w speed: buf 32768 bytes, rd 873813 byte/sec, wr 113975 byte/sec The thing that is amazing about this is the CONNER drive is getting the SAME maximum write speed as the RAM: disk and 75% of the maximum read speed. Referring to our favourite PC-review journal (BYTE) we find in the Nov 88 issue on page 207 a 25MHz 386 machine, equipped with a MAXTOR XT4380E (300Meg at 16ms) drive getting 344K bytes/sec read and write speeds on their one megabyte file test, which is one of the fastest PC disk speeds BYTE has reported... So we find a $300 controller card and a $1300 hard disk on a measly 7.xxx MHz 68000 machine keeping up quite nicely with a $12500 BYTE review machine. BTW: those are Canadian $, at the dealers! So in the US expect to pay at least 30% less. Its soooo nice to be running on old technology... :-) :-) :-) Stephen Vermeulen Author: Express Paint Chairman: AMUC.