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From: bet@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.apple
Subject: Apple disk speed -- more info
Message-ID: <2717@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 12-Jun-84 12:50:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2717
Posted: Tue Jun 12 12:50:44 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 13-Jun-84 06:54:25 EDT
Lines: 23

I recently posted a note asking if there is something intrinsic to the Apple
disk recording scheme which make it slow, or whether it is simply coincidental
that Apple DOS and the Macintosh's system software share brain-damage that
slows down the disk access.

Ross Alford (alford@ecsvax) responded describing a program he had written
in TURBO-PASCAL for the Apple under CPM that read a ~40K file in ~10 seconds.
It then took ~20 seconds of computing. He mailed me that program, and I ran
it under TURBO-PASCAL on PC-DOS 2.10 (with the disk parameter table patch).
It took ~20 seconds to read a ~50K file, and another 10 seconds to compute.

It looks like
	a) Apple drives are not intrinsically slow
	b) insofar as Apple disk access is slow it is the fault of
	   the Apple operating system
	c) The IBM-PC is half as fast (assuming that TURBO-PASCAL
	   makes a good benchmark comparison, and that DOS 2.10
	   isn't inflicting too much overhead on disk I/O)
	d) In one (possibly typical) application the IBM-PC
	   seems to compute approximately twice as fast.

					Bennett Todd
					...{decvax,ihnp4,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!bet