[lug] hard drive speeds

Harris, James A (Jim) HarriJA at LOUISVILLE.STORTEK.COM
Tue Sep 28 13:53:05 MDT 1999


Well, I don't have any experience with them yet, but the Ultra-2 drives that
are being made should be the fastest.  I know that Tekram and Adaptec are
both making cards that support this SCSI level.  (Prob. more are, but I
haven't really looked around for 'em.)  As far as I can see the average
spindle speed of these drives is around 10,000 RPM (Seagate Cheetah is an
example) and most are seeing an average seek time of around 5-6ms.  By the
specs alone, these little monkeys outa smoke.  They're very expensive, but
for the performance it's probably worth it.  Ultra-2 is (correct me if I'm
wrong) 10 or 20MB/sec faster than Ultra-wide.

For a cheaper solution there's the new Ultra-ATA66 standard.  Again, it's
new enough that I haven't played with it, but they're claiming to be getting
66MB/sec burst off of the drives.  They're also averaging spindle speed
around 7,200RPM.  Dunno the seek times, but I'd imagine once more mobo
makers start integrating the controllers, this will become a good cheaper
solution.

My two cents...

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael J. Hammel [mailto:mjhammel at graphics-muse.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 1999 1:48 PM
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: [lug] hard drive speeds


Question to you hardware experts:  what are the fastest hard drives
available?  Don't SCSI drives generally have faster throughput and
read/write times than IDE?

I'm working on a talk I'll be giving at ALS on the Gimp and one of the
major bottlenecks for graphic artists when using the Gimp is swapping tiles
from memory to disk and back.  My understanding is that the faster buses
being introduced in PCs these days aren't helping IDE throughput, but they 
might help SCSI subsystems using add-on cards, right?

Anyone want to take a crack at what drives are generally going to provide
the fastest throughput?
-- 
Michael J. Hammel           |
The Graphics Muse           |   Books we'll never see:
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |      "The Amish Phone Directory"
http://www.graphics-muse.org 

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