CompuServe Messages

Robert, As I've said…I've yet to see a *consumer* drive that can hit those speeds. Yes, if the drive can do multi-head reads…it's quite possible, but drives that do that are in the $10,000 price range on up. Also, don't forget, read-ahead cache on the drive can give the appearance of faster transfer rates. That is, the system asks for 100 sectors, the drive will read and pass on the 100 sectors, but it will also read the next 100 sectors (or whatever it's set at) into it's on-drive cache. IF the next request is for those sectors…they're already in the cache and the transfer is at full bus speed since no physical access is required. Many drives also use intelligent caching for both reads and writes. Again, like software drive buffers (cache) programs on the Amiga itself, the drive itself maintains a similar cache (again…the more expensive., but still in the consumer category)…so for example…frequently read data is likely to be in the cache and the transfer is extremely quick. However, take any of those drives and end to end reads and you'll find those numbers drop significantly to the true sustained read rate. Don