Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ig!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ANDREW.CMU.EDU!jm7e+ From: jm7e+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Jeremy G. Mereness") Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: Hard drive speed Message-ID: Date: 14 Apr 89 13:07:41 GMT References: <23078@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 41 > *Excerpts from ext.in.info-apple: 14-Apr-89 Hard drive speed Andy* > *McFadden@labrea.sta (1069)* > A recent issue of Call-A.P.P.L.E. had a hard drive comparison... among those > reviewed were two new Sider drives and the InnerDrive. > When it came to loading AppleWorks GS, the InnerDrive performed as well or > better than the other drives. Why do I mention this? The InnerDrive is rated > at 65ms access time; the two Sider drives were 19ms and 20ms. Obviously it > didn't perform as well in a seek test, but the point is that access time If someone could do a confirm on this, I would appreciate it. I believe the Inner Drive is faster because it includes a RAM based driver. A+, I believe, did a few comparison tests for drives with and without their RAM drivers. The bottleneck of the Apple ][ line is I/O. All reads and writes to the slots and to the video are made at 1 MHz. The Inner Drive gets around this by basing its drivers in RAM instead of on its interface card, thus the drive can figure out what to do with itself 2.5 times faster than a normal hard drive. Consequently, from the benchmarks I have seen in Call-Apple and A+, the Inner Drive is always a winner. Again, if someone more knowledgeable of the Apple innards could confirm this, I would appreciate it. In fact, I have always been curious about just what's going on with the 1MHz slowdown, and if there is ANY way to get around this. I have seen AE produce impossibilities like the PC Transporter and the Transwarp GS. If there was SOME way to reconcile the i/o bottleneck (I believe that anything's possible) without ruining Apple ][ and peripheral compatibility, I think the knowledgeable computer community would give a lot more respect to the machine. I'm always amazed at how fast the Mac does I/O, and the reason is that it does it as fast as it can; no limitations or slow-downs jeremy mereness ============= jm7e+@andrew.cmu.edu (Arpanet) r746jm7e@CMCCVB (vax.... Bitnet)