Sing it with me, y'all!

---

I can deal with IDE devices pretty well, but I am quite a bit less
knowledgeable when it comes to SCSI.

Someone recently asked me to benchmark their SCSI HDD. They believe
their HDD access is not up to par.

It's in an NT4 system. The mainboard is a MSI MS-6309 which has a
133MHz bus.

Inside is an Adaptec 29160N Ultra160 SCSI Controller. The drive itself
is a Seagate ST318437LW, A.K.A. a Barracuda 36ES.

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I've read the drive's specifications (PDF) and it looks to me that the
drive can push out:

28.1 Minimum
42.0 Average
50.8 Maximum

(MB/sec. This is in section 4.2.3. of the PDF. The PDF is available
here:

http://tinyurl.com/b88s

According to SiSoft Sandra's index of C: (which is one of the
partitions on the drive), this drive is actually pushing between 19.0
and 23.0 MB/sec.

I've seen situations where they're literally waiting for the disk. CPU
usage is 100% idle, process involved is not taking any more memory
than normal, but the disk is chugging away.

As I mentioned, I've very little experience with this. Am I simply
reading the spec wrong? Does it seem low? And if so, what could be
some of the causes?

Thanks!

m

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