[NTLUG:Discuss] Disk performance.

[Tom McDonald]

Steve Baker wrote:
> 
> Does anybody here have much experience of measuring disk drive throughput
> rates?   It's an area of PC computing that I know very little about.
> 
> I have an application that needs to load large (multi-megabyte) files very
> quickly from disk for long, sustained periods.  The nature of what I'm doing
> means that caching data in RAM won't help because I don't read the same
> file twice (well, not until we've loaded many, many Gigabytes of other stuff
> along the way).
> 
> On my PC here at home (which has a 450MHz CPU and a vanilla low-end 20Gb
> IDE drive) I'm managing to load about 5Mbytes/sec. (These files are 'PNG'
> images - and they have to be uncompressed on-the-fly).
> 
> My question is - if I go out and pick a good disk drive - or several
> drives - SCSI or IDE or whatever else works - or perhaps a RAID array
> or something - slap in a 1GHz CPU on a good motherboard...what kind of
> speedup would you expect I would get?
> 
> I'm hoping to get at least 20Mbytes/sec - more would be good.
> 
> --
> Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>
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> 
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Also check out the hdparm utility to increase your diskdrive
performance.  It makes a significant differenct in access speed and data
throughput.

Tom


-- 
Tom McDonald    <tom at compuclaim.com>

When in doubt, use brute force.
		-- Ken Thompson