From: beemer@sunnup.MAGDATA.COM (Oscar the Grouch)
Subject: Fast hard drives - seek isn't everything.
Organization: Magnetic Data MN.
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 17:35:14 GMT

In article <1992Dec17.092641.24824@doug.cae.wisc.edu> keiths@cae.wisc.edu (Keith Scidmore) writes:
>
>I asked Hard Drives Intl for their fastest IDE drive (thinking I would
>let Zeos keep the Seagate 3283A 245MB drive that came with my system 
>and upgrade immediately).
>HDI sent me a $1000 FJ2624A 510MB Fujitsu IDE drive.x


So they sent you what you asked for the disk with the fastest published specs.

>It turned out to be slower than the Seagate on
>all the benchmarks and programs I tested even though it had about
>an 8 ms seek time to the Seagate's 11 ms.  The following explains
>how this was determined and why the Seagate was faster on both
>the benchmarks and on real programs.
>
>I started by testing the drives using PCTools, Norton Utilities, 
>Checkit, and Core.  They all showed that the 245MB was *much* faster on 
>transfers but slower on average seeks.  Thinking that the larger buffer on 
>the Seagate was just making the Seagate *look* faster, to these benchmarks, 
>I ran some *real* programs and timed the results.  The tests were made 
>under DR-DOS 6 and under OS/2 2.0 HPFS.  I tested things like OS2 2.0, 
>Windows 3.1,and WIN-OS2 start up times, Xtree manipulations of large (10MB) 
>sections of my file structure, and several editors and word processors
>working with large files.  My disks were all clean (not badly fragmented).
>
>Results:
>
>The Seagate was 10-20% faster than the Fujitsu on all my program test.  The 
>reason is that the Fujitsu drive was about 18% faster on seek times but the 
>Seagate was about 50% faster in transferring the data.  I returned the 
>Fujitsu to HDI.
>
>There were two things I learned.

So who paid for your learning experience. Sounds like HDI did.

>First, transfer speed is significant in
>choosing a drive.  The Fujitsu's 8 ms average seek time (measured) didn't 
>make it faster.  The Fujitsu should have had the additional advantage in that
>the software on the larger disk takes less of a percentage of the platters
>and the seeks should have been a smaller percentage of the total stroke.
>
>Second, HDI doesn't always know what they are talking about.

What they told you was what you asked for the published stats.

>They were inaccurate in telling me the stats of both drives.  My tests
>showed that the Seagate Drive on my Zeos 486-66 VLB machine ran faster 
>in transferring data than HDI said it *could* by 50%.   This was true even
>on the Core benchmark that they suggested I use.  Unless you have a
>really fragmented disk I think the Seagate is the better bet.
>
>The bad news is that the Seagate drive is in such demand that HDI can't
>get them.  I'll just have to live with the one 245MB that came with my
>Zeos system for now.
So let me guess, after installing the disk, beating hell out of it with
your testing program, and using it for some unmentioned period of time 
you returned it for a full refund. Not; because the drive was defective.
Not because it did not meet the published specs. but because it did not
live up to your expectations. Now that it has been returned what do you
expect HDI to do with it. They can no longer sell it as a new drive, that
would be unethical. They could probably sell it as a used drive but that
is not their business. So what they do is take a loss on the drive and dump
it through a broker. This loss gets distributed across the product line as
a price increase, and we all pay more for components in the future. I for
one am unwilling to finance your education. I work for a Disk company and 
get tired of seeing this happen time and again. We have plenty of the Seagate
245s in stock but would not offer one to you. You would probably beat hell
out of it and then send it back because you did not like the color. I am
sure you would not appreciate someone doing this to something you sold them
but you seem to feel you have some special privledge that makes it ok for
you to do this. I cannot understand this kind of attitude.

>
>Keith R. Scidmore
>
Tom Neveras
-- 
Tom Neveras			twn@sunnup.MAGDATA.COM
Magnetic Data
6754 Shady Oak Road
Eden Prairie MN. 55344
Organization: Sophomore, Physics, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA