CompuServe Messages

John: The FWB Bench Test is widely regarded as an industry standard. It is actually a suite of several tests including sustained read and sustained write. You'll want to be careful though, the Bench Test gives an overall rating for a drive after it performs its 6 (?) different tests. We have found that this overall rating has NOTHING to do with video performance. It seems to heavily weight the seek time and access time and gives high ratings on that basis. As you suggest, it is sustained reads and writes that matter to video performance. One example of this is that in our testing we made a seperate inner partition to test each drives worst case (the inner tracks "spin" the lowest add therefore cannot maintain the data rate of the outer tracks). Because on this innermost partition the head doesn't have far at all to seek, FWB gave these inner tracks the highest ratings. When testing with actual video, these inner tracks typically had maximum data rates 1 MB/sec slower than the rest of the drive. Jeff New Media