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