🚀 go-pugleaf

In <804864110snz@rs32.demon.co.uk>, Roger Smith <Roger@rs32.demon.co.uk> writes:
>Our company has a number of Compaq Deskpros which have a standard IDE 
>controller on an ISA bus.
>
>I recently got hold of a couple of 540Mb Maxtor 7540 AV drives to evaluate,
>since I would like to move our applications off the Netware server and 
>have them running locally.
>
>I had sort of assumed the the 540s would be faster than the standard 120Mb 
>and 240Mb drives which are currently installed - but no.  Using the
>transfer rate diagnostics availiable on Simtel etc I am getting throughput
>of about 750KBytes/S for the 540s and nearly 1MByte/S for the others. 
>
>Is this the sort of x-fer rate I should expect?  Which *cheap* 540Mb drives
>could improve on this?
>
>
>Regards,
>-- 
>Roger Smith

My old Conner 170MB drive only got around 500k/sec - under OS/2 using
OS/2 drivers made for my Buslogic caching controller it rose to ~650/700.
I bought a new WD 540 caviar and by running my ISA bus at ~12 I can just
manage 1.25 megs/sec - that's pulling data off the platter. My DTR from the
hardware diskcache to the system is ~3megs/sec which, I believe, is pretty
close to the max for an ISA bus. This is an old ('91/2) bios in a cheap
clone 486/66.
 It really makes me wonder about all those folks out there spending $5-600 on
new video cards when their drives are an order of magnitude slower and
clearly the real bottleneck in almost any PC.
 Ditto all the constant push towards PIO infinity controllers, when their
drives can't do more than 3megs/sec anyway.
Mike