25376873%WSUVM1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Gregg Gaviglio) (10/16/88)
Hello everybody!
I've had my GVP A500 30Meg DMA hard drive for about five days now, here
are my first impressions.
The drive comes in an attractive beige case about the size of an A1010
drive. The power supply is of the external type and has no On/Off switch,
it therefore has to be plugged into a power strip with the A500. It
doesn't pass the buss, but since it can take up to 2Meg of 1 Megabit chips
on an internal expansion board, it shouldn't be a problem for most people
(there is also an external SCSI connector for attaching additional SCSI
devices). It took about thirty seconds to plug it into my A500, and
another 15 minutes or so to format it. The instalation script files are
easy to use since they are all executed from icons with XICON. This is one
of the first things that I've bought for my amiga that could easily be
installed by the general public. The drive is a 30Meg 40ms 3 1/2" Seagate.
I've noticed that every 5-10 minutes it makes a griding sound, as though it
were reading something from the disk. The people at GVP said that this was
normal for some Seagates. I was also informed that the 1.3 autoboot eproms
would be ready in about a week and that their controller would autoboot
with my Seagate. I haven't had any problems and am *very* pleased with the
performance of the drive. If there are any A500 owners looking for a hard
disk, give this one serious consideration.
I ordered directly from GVP and they shipped it the same day Blue Label at
no extra charge.
Total Cost: $875 with autoboot/RAM expansion module.
Here are the results of running diskperf on two different partitions; one
formated with FFS, and the other with SFS.
FFS: 15Meg partition, 3Megs used.
File create/delete: create 11 files/sec, delete 17 files/sec
Directory scan: 96 entries/sec
Seek/read test: 75 seek/reads per second
r/w speed: buf 512 bytes, rd 29454 byte/sec, wr 28187 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 4096 bytes, rd 163840 byte/sec, wr 109226 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 8192 bytes, rd 174762 byte/sec, wr 145635 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 32768 bytes, rd 238312 byte/sec, wr 163840 byte/sec
SFS: 14Meg partition, 3Megs used.
File create/delete: create 7 files/sec, delete 17 files/sec
Directory scan: 44 entries/sec
Seek/read test: 50 seek/reads per second
r/w speed: buf 512 bytes, rd 25450 byte/sec, wr 13797 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 4096 bytes, rd 26214 byte/sec, wr 14563 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 8192 bytes, rd 25954 byte/sec, wr 14644 byte/sec
r/w speed: buf 32768 bytes, rd 26214 byte/sec, wr 14894 byte/sec
-Gregg
PS Here are the sample timings that came with diskperf.zoo.
Performance timings using Rick Spanbauer's diskperf.c program.
Amiga Amiga Amiga Amiga Sun
ASDG Ramdisk Floppy CLtd 3/50
vd0: ram: df1: dh0:
File creations (files/sec) 18 5 <=1 7 6
File deletions (files/sec) 43 10 1 15 11
Directory scan (entries/sec) 51 5 38 50 350
Seek+read (seek+read/sec) 132 51 2 40 298
Read speed, 512 buffer (byte/sec) 70849 201649 11014 17133 240499
Read speed, 4096 buffer (byte/sec) 109226 655360 12024 17133 234057
Read speed, 8192 buffer (byte/sec) 113975 873813 12080 17133 233189
Read speed, 32768 buffer (byte/sec) 119156 873813 12136 17133 236343
Write speed, 512 buffer (byte/sec) 46811 137970 4974 12603 215166
Write speed, 4096 buffer (byte/sec) 63937 262144 5180 13512 182466
Write speed, 8192 buffer (byte/sec) 65536 291271 5170 13653 179755
Write speed, 32768 buffer (byte/sec) 67216 327680 5190 13797 187580
Notes:
(1) All tests done under 1.2 release 33.46.
(2) df1: tests done after "addbuffers 32" & fresh formatted disk
(3) vd0: tests done with 2Mb recoverable ram disk, nearly full.
(4) ram: tests done with ASDG ram attached and active for ram: use
(5) All amiga timings done by Fred Fish. Sun-30/50 timings
by Rick Spanbauer.pds@quintus.uucp (Peter Schachte) (10/18/88)
In article <4902@louie.udel.EDU> 25376873%WSUVM1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Gregg Gaviglio) writes: > I've had my GVP A500 30Meg DMA hard drive for about five days now, here >are my first impressions. [nice words about the drive] Anyone know if there will be a A1000 version of this? -Peter Schachte pds@quintus.uucp ..!sun!quintus!pds