Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!mcvax!enea!kuling!grzm
From: grzm@kuling.UUCP (Gunnar Blomberg)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Macintosh (IWM) vs Atari 520ST
Message-ID: <881@kuling.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 1-Feb-86 22:20:53 EST
Article-I.D.: kuling.881
Posted: Sat Feb  1 22:20:53 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Feb-86 03:29:02 EST
Organization: Comp.Sc.Dept., Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 33

From the preview of the Atari 520ST in the January 1986 issue of BYTE:
> We were impressed by the high data-transfer rate of both the
> floppy-disk drives and the hard-disk drives we tested with the
> 520ST. The speed is a tribute to the efficiency of the DMA custom
> chip and the WD1772 floppy controller.  I/O is quick (no endless
> waiting during disk reads), [...] you can copy an entire disk [...]
> in 99 seconds and copy a 32K-byte file in 16 seconds.  The disk-copy
> operation does not automatically format the disks, which requires an
> additional 54 seconds

  Ok, so how much faster than a Mac is this, I wondered.  I tried it
on a Mac at my work and came up with the following rather surprising
figures:

			  520ST	  Mac

	copy full disk:    99s	   75s
	copy 32K file	   16s	   12s
	format disk	   54s	   36s

  The copying was done with the Finder (one file filling the entire
disk in the first case - it takes *much* longer if there are many
files).  Formatting was done by formatting the disk on a Lisa and then
clicking "Initialize" when the Mac got it.

  Interesting, isn't it?  Somebody must have screwed badly somewhere
(and I'm not saying it isn't me, though I can't see what I could have
done differently)...

-- 
Gunnar Blomberg (Grzm), Computing Science Dept., Uppsala University, Sweden
Tel: +46 18 13 76 02
UUCP: grzm@kuling.UUCP (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!grzm)