[NTLUG:Discuss] Disk performance.

[Steve Baker]

Does anybody here have much experience of measuring disk drive throughput
rates?   It's an area of PC computing that I know very little about.

I have an application that needs to load large (multi-megabyte) files very
quickly from disk for long, sustained periods.  The nature of what I'm doing
means that caching data in RAM won't help because I don't read the same
file twice (well, not until we've loaded many, many Gigabytes of other stuff
along the way).

On my PC here at home (which has a 450MHz CPU and a vanilla low-end 20Gb
IDE drive) I'm managing to load about 5Mbytes/sec. (These files are 'PNG'
images - and they have to be uncompressed on-the-fly).

My question is - if I go out and pick a good disk drive - or several
drives - SCSI or IDE or whatever else works - or perhaps a RAID array
or something - slap in a 1GHz CPU on a good motherboard...what kind of
speedup would you expect I would get?

I'm hoping to get at least 20Mbytes/sec - more would be good.

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