Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hpcc05!hpdmd48!sritacco
From: sritacco@hpdmd48.boi.hp.com (Steve Ritacco)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Workstation Disk I/O
Message-ID: <14900016@hpdmd48.boi.hp.com>
Date: 4 Oct 90 16:10:13 GMT
Organization: Hewlett Packard - Boise, ID
Lines: 19

Due to some recent experiences, and some reviews I have read, I've started
to wonder about disk performance on workstations.  I thought this might
be an interesting topic for discussion in this group.

Let's consider the SPARCstations, DECstations, Personal Iris, Mips Magnum,
NeXT, HP s300/s400, Sony NEWS, etc.

How do each of these systems handle their disk I/O, what are the cost/
performance advantages of the approaches, what is the realized performance,
what is the potential performance, and what is the bottle-neck?

This is prompted by my personal experience with the NeXT, HP, Mips M-120,
Sun 3, and DECstation.  The disk through-put of these machines varies
as greatly as their configurations.  I was also intrigued by the UNIX Review
story on the Mips Magnum which found it to be very fast at disk I/O even
though it used 3.5" drives.

By the way, I don't work for HP's workstation or disk drive division, this
is just personal interest.