Can anyone tell me if different hard disk drivers (Apple vs FWB vs Intech, etc.) will make a speed difference? I think all the drives are formatted, hence the drivers question, with Apple formatting utility, which came with OS9.1.
Here's the scenerio. I don't trust manufacturers claims, and so I usually do some testing after I get a new component. In my 8600/XLR8 G4/450 I have a Sonnet Trio. I just got a new/refurbed SCSI drive, and decided to see how fast everything is and how the different drives/buses compare. The old SCSI drive (5400rpm) and New SCSI drive (10,000rpm) as well as the Apple CD-Rom drive are attached to the internal SCSI bus, a 7200rpm ATA100 drive and my new 48x16x48 CD-RW drive is attached to the ATA bus on the Trio card, and an external FW drive is attached to the FW port of the trio card. Whew! My tests. I tried to set up a 600 meg ram disk, but it would only allow me to do 250 Megs. (Is there a limitation? I have a Gig of ram) So, I took a bunch of files from a CD (Diablo - 210 items - 88.9 Megs) and did a timed copy from each CD drive to ram disk. I copied the same set of files to each hard drive and then did a timed copy to the ram disk. I also took a single 421 meg file and copied from drive to drive, both ways. Except for the first SCSI drive, I used an empty partition on each drive for each test. The end results really surprised me. Basically CD's to ram times were about the same. The times were approximately the same from any hard drive to any hard drive, or any hard drive to ram. I would have thought that the FW drive would have smoked them all (400Mb/sec), followed by the ATA/100 (100 Mb/sec) and then new SCSI (10 Mb/sec) with old SCSI being real slow (10Mb/sec). Now, when I run the Intech speed test utility or the FWB test suite, or others, they show large differences. I haven't yet done the math MB/sec, etc. I have the numbers if someone wants me to send them to look at. At the moment, I'm at a loss as to why. Does everything go through the PCI bus? Is the PCI bus a 33 Mb/sec bus? Are the speeds more pronounced with small (bursts) files and less with overall throughput? Once again, would different drivers make a significant difference. Of course, I'm now wondering about my Trio card as well. Is it limiting the ATA and FW transfer speeds? I don't want to bore other listers, so if you want to e-mail me directly, and discuss it deeper, that's ok. STeve -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
