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From: dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Disk speeds on Atari ST and Macintosh
Message-ID: <8702101957.AA04584@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 10-Feb-87 14:57:49 EST
Article-I.D.: cory.8702101957.AA04584
Posted: Tue Feb 10 14:57:49 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Feb-87 19:46:16 EST
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Organization: University of California at Berkeley
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>	Of course you realize that these speeds _can_ be greatly improved
>upon.  Generic benchmarks are really annoying, you know?  The best bench-
>mark, in my opinion, would take the best possible speeds for each machine.
>And it's not like you have to roll up your sleeves and hijack the FPC either.
>Some guy I know wrote his own benchmark doing exactly the above, but
>with a 32K buffer, and the time went down to somewhere in between the Mac
>Plus and the Amiga.

	The best possible speeds to read and write to the floppy for all 
three machines is the theoretical maximum for the disk mechanism.  Generic
benchmarks are meant to show the overhead of the DOS in question.  Still,
the BYTE benchmark results are seriously lacking.  Properly, the benchmarks
should be run for various buffer sizes (512, 4K, 32K) and on both a blank
disk and a well-used disk, with all the results published.

			-Matt