Great information.  Any chance on or both of ya'll could tell the
neophyte (Me) how to run a speed test?  I would love to know from time
to time because I have just installed a server in my office and it is
much slower at times than promised or expected.  I only have two
desktops connected on site and one server connected acting as a terminal
server for remote desktop for my offsite people access the database and
programs.  I have a Dell Power edge 1800 with Windows SBS 2003 acting as
the file server and running Outlook for everyone using what they call an
Exchange Server.  The Exchange server is constantly using 1.3G to 1.8G
of what is called virtual memory to run.  I have 2G of RAM in it that
came pre-installed.

Anyway, would love to know how to run a speed test on it and my XP SP2
Dell Optiplex GX620.

Thanks,
Trey Holm
-----Original Message-----
From: Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Russ Poffenberger
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2006 9:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Hard Drive Speed test

Hi Don,

150 is the maximum interface speed. The disk being a rotational device
is governed by physical laws constrained by the platter rotation speed
and bit density on the platters. Regardless of how fast the interface
is, you can't get the bits off the platter any faster than they pass
under the read/write heads. You may get a very short burst faster than
the platter speed as data is pulled out of the cache, but the cache is
exhausted in a fraction of a second.

To make it more complicated, the bit density varies between the inside
and outside tracks of the platters, so that the measured speed depends
on where the test was performed physically on the disk.

Most disks these days spin at 7200RPM, with lower end and most notebook
drives running at 5400 RPM. Higher end disks like the Western Digital
Raptor spin at 10000RPM, but are considerably more expensive. At the
very high end are Seagate Cheetah disks (usually SCSI or fiber only)
that spin at 15000RPM. These are typically employed in servers.

HTH,
Russ Poffenberger
[log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Don Penlington
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2006 10:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Hard Drive Speed test


XP Pro SP2.

In Device Manager/IDE Controllers/ Secondary Channel,  when I run the
speed test for my Hard Drive (Serial ATA DMA) it says that the
theoretical speed is 150. The Burst speed on test is 113 and sustained
speed is 58.

These test figures seem to me to be way short of the theoretical speed.
Is the theoretical speed that for an "ideal" HD, or is it the
theoretical speed for my actual HD?

Should I be worried, or are these results normal?

I don't seem to have any problems---just curious.

Don Penlington

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