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From: garys@techbook.com (Gary Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: ACTUAL DATA THROUGHPUT FROM A HARD DRIVE???
Message-ID: <1991Apr12.043027.2695@techbook.com>
Date: 12 Apr 91 04:30:27 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: TECHbooks of Beaverton Oregon - Public Access Unix
Lines: 46



OK all you PC Hardware People Here is a question that I have been trying to
get a reasonable answer to for several weeks without any solid response.

Situation:

  I intend to purchase a new hard drive and controller for use on a 486/33

Question:

  How do I determine what drive/controller will give me maximum performance
  for minimum $$$$.

Just buying the most expensive drive/contoler combo may not be the optimum
solution. My computer has a standard AT bus, so at some point the bus speed
becomes the limiting factor along with the controller card. High transfer
rate specs for drives only covers the exchange between the drive and
controller and is not the (w)hole picture as the bus and processor cannot
run at drive transfer speed.

Ideally, I would want to purchase a controller and drive combo that would
exceed the bus throughput rate by say 10%.

Qusetion:

  How do I determine what the maximum bus throughput rate is for an AT bus?

  How do I measure the throughput rate?

  What is the optimum controller/drive combo?


My current research says that I should go with an EDSI drive with about a
20MB transfer rate and the cheap Ultrastore controler that has a 32K cache.
I can't find any reason to use the multi-meg cache controllers as the system
will be running single user DOS/Windows.

Any thoughts/experiences/help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Gary Scott
-- 
Gary L. Scott,  Decision Technology, Beaverton, OR (503) 642-4196
"Strategic Business Applications"    garys@techbook.com (subscription unix)
Any opinion expressed are mine and do not reflect the opinion of anyone
including myself!!!