🚀 go-pugleaf

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Reply-To: slavenbg@prle2.UUCP (Gert Slavenburg and Joost Janse)
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Organization: Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven
Keywords: SH204 HARDDISK

We recently aquired the European SH204. Since we found several problems
with the previous prototype harddisk, we were eager to compare them :

  - The noise level seems to be down by a factor of two (subjective).
    Where the prototype produced a steady hum, the commercial SH204 
    produces mostly fan-noise, which to us is much less distracting.

  - The cablelength is now 60 cm, which allows placing the drive next
    to the ST with the indicator light facing towards you.

  - Partitioning of up to 4 partitions (max. 16 M per partition) is now
    possible.

  - The major problem with the prototype is the slow speed of writing on
    a substantantially filled hard disk. This problem appears NOT solved
    in the commercial SH204.
    The measurements below show that overhead on file writing depends
    on the usage of a partition. For a partition containing 7.5 MByte,
    allocation for an empty file takes approx.  7 seconds ! (on a floppy,
    this takes 4 seconds.....)

    Copying time for 4 folders totalling 55 items (1.5 MByte)
    from harddisk into another partition (of size 10M) :
      destination partition empty        :  2:06 minutes
      destination 1.5 M filled           :  3:27
      destination 3.0 M filled           :  4:38
      destination 4.5 M filled           :  5:52
      destination 6.0 M filled           :  7:03
    With the partition containing 7.5 M, writing an empty file takes
    approx 7 seconds and a 32kByte file 7.5 seconds. Writing the same
    file on floppy takes 10.5 seconds.

The above measurements were done using a AHDI.PRG version 1.4 (dyer).

As long as this problem is not fixed, you should consider if this is
a device you want : 

  File reading and program loading is fast.
  Applications allocating many small files (compilers...) run slow,
  sometimes slower than a floppy drive.