Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!news.funet.fi!funic!santra!vipunen.hut.fi!mstr
From: mstr@vipunen.hut.fi (Markus Strand)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: IDE drives: good or evil?
Message-ID: <1991Mar25.165950.14531@santra.uucp>
Date: 25 Mar 91 16:59:50 GMT
References: <12492@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <12070002@hplvec.LVLD.HP.COM> <1991Mar24.173308.3337@jwt.UUCP>
Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system)
Reply-To: mstr@vipunen.hut.fi (Markus Strand)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology
Lines: 20

In article <1991Mar24.173308.3337@jwt.UUCP> john@jwt.UUCP (John Temples) writes:
>Since most IDE drives have on-board caches, all Coretest tells you is how
>fast you can read from that cache.  Not particularly meaningful unless your
>application reads the same block of 64K from the drive over and over...
>But Coretest comes up with an impressively high number which looks good in
>ad copy -- too bad it doesn't mean anything.

I use on my harddisks tools which compress the disk so the data is continuos,
so IDE-drive's cache is just what I need.

>Is there a Coretest-like program out there which reads, say, 10 contiguous
>megabytes from a drive to measure the transfer rate?  This should
>defeat just about any hardware or software cacheing mechanism.

When do you need to read 10M at a time. No programs need that much data.
Only when you copy somethimg you read 10M, but then you also use 
floppies that are very slow.

Markus Strand
mstr@vipunen.hut.fi