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From: dold@mitisft.Convergent.COM (Clarence Dold)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general
Subject: Re: Step rate change (WD2010) Some Benchmarks ... **IT WORKS!**
Message-ID: <1196@mitisft.Convergent.COM>
Date: 25 Aug 89 16:37:32 GMT
References: <948@icus.islp.ny.us>
Organization: Convergent Technologies, San Jose, CA
Lines: 31

in article <948@icus.islp.ny.us>, lenny@icus.islp.ny.us (Lenny Tropiano) says:
|>(Clarence Dold) writes:
|>...
|>Try setting the Step Rate in an iv.desc file to 14 instead of 0, 
|>then iv -u the disk.  No loss of data, just a 20% increase in seek 
|>performance on 28mSec disks.
> ...
> I ran this program 5 times (100 iterations each) in step-rate 0, and
> step-rate 14.  Wow! There was a difference.
...
> So on the average it was 14 time units (60th of a second) faster ...
> That's a 27.4% increase in seek performance, Thanks Clarence!
...
> It seems faster overall anyhow ...  I wonder how it will work on
> those 20 megger's out there with 67ms seek time ...

Without attempting to use my calculator, I couldn't figure a mSec/seek
from your test results.
I vaguely recall that the change from 0 to 14 had no effect on drives
with a spec of >41 mSec, but I never figured out why that was true.
++++
A follow-up to a different posting:
Yes that is 6.5 milliseconds for step 13, which is important.
A step rate of 14 is horrendously slow on the WD1010, its definition
was changed on the WD2010, since no one had used it anyhow.

And the same disclaimer:
I work for the company, not on that product.
-- 
Clarence A Dold - dold@tsmiti.Convergent.COM
		...pyramid!ctnews!tsmiti!dold