Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!steveb From: steveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Steve Beats) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Hard disk speed question. Message-ID: <4156@cbmvax.UUCP> Date: 30 Jun 88 14:49:15 GMT References: <6957@cup.portal.com> Reply-To: steveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Steve Beats) Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA Lines: 21 In article <6957@cup.portal.com> Michael_J_Dedina@cup.portal.com writes: >Would a 30ms hard drive give you significantly better performance than a 60 or >80ms drive on an Amiga (I'd be using it with an A500 and the -MAX- interface)? >I remember hearing that it wouldn't make much difference on a PC/XT, because >disk access time was insignificant compared to other bottlenecks in the system. >------------------------- >Mike Dedina Definitely yes! I've been working on a Quantum drive with an average 19ms seek time for about a month. That sucker really flies. In the course of doing some testing and diagnostic work, I had to use a couple of drives that were rated at 65ms and 80ms average access times respectively. The difference was spectacular (or apalling, whatever your point of view is). Basically, once you start getting into SCSI transfer rates, a long seek time becomes a major detriment to the overall performance and "feel" of the drive. Bear in mind, if you are getting 500-600K burst transfer rates from your drive, that evens out to about 1ms per 512 byte block. Therefore, stepping to the next track on an 80ms seek time drive just cost you 40K/s of throughput, regardless of interleaving. A point to ponder, no ? Steve