Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!uwvax!shorty!thaler
From: thaler@shorty.CS.WISC.EDU (Maurice Thaler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Dell 310 flame (of sorts)
Message-ID: <8779@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 9 Oct 89 17:02:05 GMT
References: <8634@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <206900128@prism>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: thaler@shorty.cs.wisc.edu (Maurice Thaler)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 49

In article <206900128@prism> rob@prism.TMC.COM writes:
>
>   Jumping into the fray...
>
>   A question - have you actually compared the Dell 310 with other machines 
>at doing 'real world' tasks, or just on hardware benchmarks? I have a Dell 
>325 (a 25Mhz version of the 310, basically), and on disk bound tasks, I have 
>yet to find a machine that can beat it. The disk's low level measurements 
>are good-but-not-great in some areas (transfer rate of 550K/sec) and 
>excellent in others (avg. seek time of 14ms), but the overall performance 
>is outstanding. 
>
>   When a cache is thrown in (which I'd think anyone doing disk intensive
>work would want), the measurements naturally change (yielding an impressive, 
>though meaningless, transfer rate of 4MB/sec), but it still outperforms 
>other machines by a fair margin. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to 
>someone wanting a high-performance machine.

I did do some "real world" testing. The bottom line is that the data
transfer rate is critical to great performance. I would venture to say
that the 20Mhz mylex 386 that I tested on would have a "snappier" feel
than your 25mhz because of disk i/o. What first brought this to my
attention was when I was visiting a friend's office  and I saw him boot
up Ventura (a program I use all day long) on his 16Mhz 286 and it came
up much faster than on my 20Mhz Dell. The difference between our
machines really came down to disk i/o. The DTC controller WITHOUT A
CACHE does 990K/sec. which is almost double the rate of the DELL w/ a
Western Digital controller. Now if you think about it, a cache will
never do you any good untill you have loaded the data once. The bottem
line is that you will never do better than the data transfer rate for a
first read. Now don't get me wrong, I believe in using a cache, I
generally use smartdrv.sys which I have found to be the least prone to
conflicts with other software (for example, SUPERPCK is not great with
high speed communications), and on my next machine I am going to get
an even larger memory configuration so I can use a larger cache, but I
do feel that the bus limiting my i/o is extremely frustrating. 
   
I am basically saying that the DELL is a fine machine if you expect fast
computing, but mediocre i/o. The Dell is generally reliable, uses
reasonably generic parts (like the WD controller) and is not a machine
to be ashamed of, but they have risen to the higher levels in prestige
and gotten a little more like IBM in not supporting equipment they don't
supply.


If you think the DELL325's disk performance is the best available, it is
simply from not having tested the waters lately :-).
Maurice Thaler   SYSOP  Audio Projects BBS (608) 836-9473
                 SYSOP  Power Board    BBS (608) 222-8842