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What do you like for benchmarking drive speeds on windows 98?

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hunterjwizzard

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I've been thinking a lot about storage interfaces recently. My retro 98 PC has both a fast CF to IDE and a SD to IDE just as part of the setup. Today o was going through my parts boxes and found a nice u160 SCSI drive and PCI controller card. I've also got some 15k rpm SCSI drives in inventory. I was thinking about loading up some of this hardware and benchmarking different bits against each other. But I've not had this variety of components to fiddle with in the past, so I've never tried software for it.

Any suggestions?
 
Not the speed is relevant, but the CPU usage during access. SCSI always wins over DMA-capable IDE and that over PIO IDE. A better way to test that is playing a video instead of using benchmark tools. A video may stutter from flash media if there is no DMA, while play fine from a SCSI hard disk. That's why - for me - benchmark tools have no real-world usage at all.
 
You really see a difference in very old systems with slow processors when using SCSI vs PIO IDE.

Benchmarking is what I use to find drives that are failing or bad cables. I have seen bad SATA cables cause drives to limp along at a fraction of their true speeds. Drives with too many reallocated sectors will have crazy looking transfer speeds.

It's like benchmarking memory, dual channel DDR4 will kill vs single channel in benchmark software but you don't notice a difference in games. On storage latency can be much more important than max speed unless you are transferring very large files.
 
Depending on the SCSI controller, recall that some of the high-end ones had massive amounts of cache (e.g. the CSC FastCache ones in particular).
 
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Chuck(G) said:
Depending on the SCSI controller, recall that some of the high-end ones had massive amounts of cache (e.g. the CSC FastCache ones in particular).
Click to expand...

Most good RAID controllers had DRAM cache, usually used SDRAM modules. I have a few PERC cards that have 128-512M of DRAM cache on them.
 
I have a really high end one but its 64 bit PCI and has no win98 drivers. My only regular PCI card is an Adaptec 2940UW. Its currently in a dead system I've been robbing parts out of, so may as well rob it out and have some fun. That system was SCSI only, which may explain why it felt so quick.
 
I know its generally agreed that RAID is a waste of time in win98 but I'm still a consummate RAIDhead.
 
A 2940UW is considerably faster than early IDE, especially in PIO modes. Not only will disk transfers be faster, but it takes a huge burden off the CPU having to setup and manage PIO transfers. It makes a big difference on 486 machines.

It is, however, considerably slower than later ATA-66 spec and onwards drives that can do DMA/UDMA and 32 bit transfers. The 2940UW maxes out at 40 MB/s, but it's still useful if you need more than four drives and/or don't need high performance disks.

I don't think I've ever seen RAID used on Windows 9x. I can't imagine that it'd be much fun to do it, even getting not-bog-standard IDE/SCSI controllers working on it is a nightmare. It's even more of a nightmare to get DMA/UDMA working on IDE with finding the correct chipset drivers.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Which reminds me--does anyone have a use for a (still in shrink wrap) Adaptec AHA3985? (Netware RAID controller)
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does hanging it in a display case and staring at it lovingly count as a use? I just looked up a picture and that thing is gorgeous.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
A 2940UW is considerably faster than early IDE, especially in PIO modes. Not only will disk transfers be faster, but it takes a huge burden off the CPU having to setup and manage PIO transfers. It makes a big difference on 486 machines.

It is, however, considerably slower than later ATA-66 spec and onwards drives that can do DMA/UDMA and 32 bit transfers. The 2940UW maxes out at 40 MB/s, but it's still useful if you need more than four drives and/or don't need high performance disks.

I don't think I've ever seen RAID used on Windows 9x. I can't imagine that it'd be much fun to do it, even getting not-bog-standard IDE/SCSI controllers working on it is a nightmare. It's even more of a nightmare to get DMA/UDMA working on IDE with finding the correct chipset drivers.
Click to expand...
So it turns out the card I have is an Adaptec 19160. I was guessing based on eBay images.

I did in fact use raid in win98. In fact my persuit of raid is part of why I always had terrible graphics cards. Unfortunately then as now I have not been able to find a caching IDE raid card for 98. I might try a SCSI one since small 15krpm drives are still relatively available.

Its just a fun project. I work in HPC storage now. I just friggin love RAID.
 
I still have a couple IDE cards I used to stripe 2 IDE drives on my Win2k server to get extra speed out of them around 2000.
 
I have a whole box of various Promise Fasttrak cards. But none of the ones that work with '98 do caching.
 
I have a pre Windows 98 caching raid controller actually.

Precision Instruments CARDVLB-C Raid Level 1 controller VLB with 4 x 30 pin SIMM slots for up to 16MB of cache. It even says it break the 550MB barrier per drive!
 
Lol at the advertisement for it. Break the 550 MB drive limit, but can't use larger than 4.5 GB drives.

Interesting it says it has an onboard processor for offloading the host CPU, wonder what it uses.
 
Unknown_K said:
I have a pre Windows 98 caching raid controller actually.

Precision Instruments CARDVLB-C Raid Level 1 controller VLB with 4 x 30 pin SIMM slots for up to 16MB of cache. It even says it break the 550MB barrier per drive!
Click to expand...
Yeah see where can I find that thing's PCI descendants? haha.
 
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