🚀 go-pugleaf

I've been following the recent discussions here about hard drive
reliability, and especially the comments on the 3.5" Quantums and the
5.25" CDC/Imprimis Wrens.  I've also found some possibly contradictory
performance comparisons for these drives.  Maybe someone here can clear
this up.

I have some data sheets from Imprimis which claim read and write rates of
about 9 megabits/sec for a 100 meg Wren V.  They claim that a Quantum Pro
80 runs at about 6 megabits/sec under the same conditions.  But the fine
print under the chart says that the Quantum's diskcache was turned off
(hmm..).  "SCSI Evaluator" was used as the benchmark.  Micronet makes a
similar claim: they say that their 5.25" Wrens are at least 66% faster
than any 3.5" drive with equivalent capacity.

But SuperMac and GCC both claim that their Quantums measure peak
throughputs of 2 megabytes/sec (I assume this means 16 megabits/sec).
When I asked for a sustained transfer rate, GCC gave me a figure of 1.25
megabytes/sec (10 megabits/sec), but the tech rep did not know the test
conditions.

This seems like a big discrepancy, and I'm curious to know if different
benchmark conditions, different drivers, etc. would be sufficient to
explain it.  Have any of you done any independent performance comparisons
of products built on Wrens and Quantums (especially the ~100 meg units)?

In an earlier posting, someone claimed that the Quantums do not have
caching.  But the SuperMac and GCC brochures say that these devices have
64k look-ahead caches.  How does such a cache work?  And why would Imprimis
disable it for their throughput test?
-- 
Julian Vrieslander 
Neurobiology & Behavior, W250 Mudd Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853    
UUCP: {cmcl2,decvax,rochester,uw-beaver}!cornell!batcomputer!eacj
INTERNET: eacj@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu     BITNET: eacj@CRNLTHRY