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

[haymiggan]

try diskspeed from here or sysspeed from aminet (i think)
http://www.sinz.org/Michael.Sinz/Amiga/

[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

[haymiggan]

Hey mate,

Depends on what kind of size you test on.
I use SFS and have a SCSI-IDE bridge as a solution until i get a real SCSI-drive (far better at smaller file load due to seektimes on scsi drives)...

But on big files, scsi-ide bridges is pretty ok...look below
Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file:      6488712 bytes/sec
Write to file:    8995137 bytes/sec
Read from file:   8565100 bytes/sec

Testing with a 524288 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file:      7786455 bytes/sec
Write to file:    9343746 bytes/sec
Read from file:   7710117 bytes/sec

[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

[haymiggan]

You should get like 4-7MB with that PF, set buffers on testdrive? And all drives gives same result?

What is your system?

[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

[adolescent]

What PIO mode is the drive running at?  Also, what kind of setup are you using (model, CPU, memory, etc.).  Remember, the Fast ATA doesn't support DMA so it's normal to be slower than a DMA SCSI controller like above.  But, your speeds don't seem that good at all.

[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

[NightShade737]

You could always use the SCSI controler on one of the accellerator cards. The SCSI3 (Ultra Wide) controlers are capable of 40MBps.

[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

[lorddef]

well if someone wrote a driver for a UltraLVD360 PCI card for the mediator you could get 360mb/s

[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

[Crumb]

remember that if you compare speeds of different systems you should indicate the block size.

I get better results with 2kbytes and 4kbytes blocks than with 512bytes... And with the size of icons 2kbytes is usually a nice size.

BTW you can use IDE<->UWscsi controllers to have a lot of space.

I use SCSIBench (it's on Aminet) to test the speed of my drives.

[NightShade737]

That must be a relitively old PC, as that is quite low. My machine I am using now gets ~60MBps (read and write).

My Amigas 840MB drive on my A1200 got roughly 1.7MBps which is dire. I wonder how much my new Seagate cheetah will get on my CS's SCSI when they both arrive...

Crumb: I assume you are refering to disk cluster size as opposed to block size.