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.