Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!sprite.berkeley.edu!pmchen
From: pmchen@sprite.berkeley.edu (Peter M. Chen)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs
Subject: Re: Hard drive speeds
Message-ID: <16567@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 25 Aug 89 22:02:39 GMT
References: <17640@ut-emx.UUCP>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: pmchen@mustard.Berkeley.EDU (Peter M. Chen)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 17

In article <17640@ut-emx.UUCP> croley@walt.cc.utexas.edu (David T. Croley) writes:
>
>I am currently trying to come up with a rule of thumb so that I can
>determine the relative speed of a hard drive.  I have seen drives
>with fast access times and slow through-puts and drives with slow
>access times and high through-puts.  Which is more important?

Depends on your workload.  For workloads with large transfer sizes (or
predominantly sequential accesses), throughput is more important (assuming your
system above can handle all the throughput that's coming up at it).  For
workloads with small, predominantly random accesses, access time (seek +
rotation) is more important.

My guess is that, for Unix, access time is more important, since transfer
sizes are pretty small (8K?).

Pete