How do I determine the read/write speed?

[jonssonj]

Hello everyone!

I wonder if there exists some program that can test your read/write speed of my harddrive?

I think that my harddrive is very slow and I have installed the SFS filessystem, but its still slow.

thanks in advance!
/Jörgen

[jonssonj]

Thanks!

I found one more program to download, The PM program. It shows how much you use the CPU in percent :-)

I have downloaded and I have run the Diskspeed V4.2. Its really a lot of speeds showing in the test. What numbers shall I look for? What numbers should I have, with my FAST ATA 1200 IDE controller and SFS filesystem (I checked my boot partition DH0:)?

/Jörgen

[jonssonj]

Hmm, I see that you almost gets 6.5 MB/sec in the create file when testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.

I only get 1 MB/sec in the same test. Here is my numbers:

Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 1006996 bytes/sec
Write to file: 1285019 bytes/sec
Read from file: 1559220 bytes/sec

How can I speed up things here? With the FAST ATA IDE controller in the A1200, I hope I can get faster disc access than this, cant I?

I have a block size of 1024 on my partitions. What do you have? My Max transfer rate is 0x0001FFFE, is this correct?

/Jörgen

[jonssonj]

How do I set Buffers on the drive?

I have not tested my other partition. But its on the same harddrive so I suspect that I will get the same result on that partition.

My drive is an Western Digital, Model WD102BB. Its a 7200rpm harddrive and its size is 10254 MB. According to Western Digitals homepage, its teoretical speed with PIO 4 is 16.6 MB/sec from buffer to host. So I guess the problem is not the drive anyway.

I have the drive connected to the first IDE channel on the FAST ATA IDE controller.

So, if its not the drive that is slow, what can it be? How do I set the buffer for the drive?

/Jörgen

[jonssonj]

Hello!

I have a A1200T with a Blizzard 68030/50MHz without FPU. I have 32 MB, 70ns memory and the FAST ATA IDE controller from Elbox.

I think I have fixed it now. I changed the PIO mode from 4 to 5 and raised the buffer in HDTOOLBOX from 100 to 400. Now I get between 6.0 MB and 8.0 MB/sec speeds when Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.

I have also noticed a slight performance increase of my computer. I don't have the absolute numbers here. I can post them when I get home tonight.

I also wonder why the harddrive can't go faster on the amiga. Now when we have PCI slots, it should be possible to fit a ULTRA ATA 133MHz IDE controller in one of these slots. Is this possible?

/Jörgen

[jonssonj]

Yes, it's surely possible, but why can't we have harddrives that goes as fast as on the pc. The teoretical speed on the pc IDE disc is 133MB/sec. Why can't we have that on the Amiga?

/Jörgen

[jonssonj]

Yeah, now we are talking,  :-D  

by the way, I tested the read write speed on my office computer, and I got these values:

********************2004-03-09 11:32:31********************
Disk: c: [] Read speed: 24265 kb/sec
Read mode: 65536 blocks - Test file size: 1Mb
**************************************************************
********************2004-03-09 11:32:44********************
Disk: c: [] Write speed: 28523 kb/sec
Write mode: 65536 blocks - Test file size: 1Mb
**************************************************************

Thats a little better than the 6 to 7 MB/sec I have on my Amiga.

But seriously, how hard is it to make a driver for such a card that you mentioned lorddef? Is there anyone here that are capable of making a driver for a decent Harddrive controller?

I myself is completely new to amiga programming, so I can't do it.

/Jörgen

[jonssonj]

I don't know a squat about the test I did. I just did a search on google and downloaded this program:

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_download/0,fid,16880,fileidx,1,00.asp

it's name is Mpow V1.2

I selected the 65536 block size and the 1MB file size, that is also mentioned above in the output... :-)

But that's not the point here. I jus want a driver for a decent harddrive controller to the Amiga.

/Jörgen