🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 28 Nov 1997 00:50:57 GMT, midigard@aol.com (Midgard) wrote:

>For months I've been listening to my brother boost about how lightning
>fast his standard EIDE hard drives are.  Claims it all depends the
>motherboard's controller on how fast a hard drive can get, up to the
>maximum rated speed for that drive of course.  Right now I'm using a
>486 VIP green Mainboard (M919) w/ an AMD P75 cpu & have *never* gotten
>more than 1,870 kb/sec using my Seagate ST-3851A HDD.  But you're
>always hearing about how these drives are capable of 16 MB/sec data
>transfer rates.  In a few weeks, I'll be upgrading to  a Socket 7
>mainboard with either an Intel 166MHZ MMX or AMD K6 166MHz.  But I'd
>like to keep my present drive & want to know once and for all if it's
>actually possible to get the maximum rated speed for these "older"
>EIDE drives?  Is it, in fact, the controller on the motherboard that
>determines data transfer rates with hard disks?  
>

   All sorts of things determine the disk transfer rate.
Manufacturers give figures based on best performance transferring from
the internal cache usualy.
   The first limit is the rotational speed of the disk.  Using that,
and the apparant internal layout of the drive, you can work out the
theoretical speed that data will come off the drive if you read a
complete track.  (This is only an approximation, since the real data
layout is different from the published one, and varies over the disk).
  This figure usualy is less than the 'quoted' maximum, and is often
close to the achieved value!

  Regards,
        Harry.