DISKTIMER GS A Hard Disk Benchmarking Program (C) 1988 Joe Jaworski 18405 Tamarind Street Fountain Valley, CA 92708 GEnie: JVJAWORSKI CompuServe: [73307,310] This program is FREEWARE. It is copyright material but you may use it and/or distribute it free of charge to anyone for personal, non-commercial use. Licensing is required for including DiskTimerGS with any commercial hardware or software product. Contact me at the above address for licensing information. What is DiskTimerGS? DisktimerGS is a "Benchmark" or performance rating program designed to measure how efficiently a hard disk drive will perform on an Apple IIGS. It is designed to give you, the consumer, a rating system by which to measure the performance of hard disk drives and their manufacturers claims. Like all benchmarks, test results cannot be strictly correlated to a drive's performance in an actual application. However, the key to a benchmark is the comparison of results between different products. DiskTimerGS has been designed to eliminate as many system variables as possible to insure accurate results in a wide variety of system configurations. DiskTimerGS is immune to disk cache settings, controller cache memory, partitioning, system interrupts (including mouse movement), and buffered drive seeks. APPLETALK USERS: DiskTimerGS disables interrupts during the actual test periods. This will "hang" the network. Disconnect AppleTalk before running DisktimerGS. Using DisktTimerGS DiskTimerGS is very easy to use. Simple transfer a copy of the program to the disk drive you want to test and launch it from there. It doesn't matter if the program is put in a folder or in the root directory. However, it must be launched from the drive you want to test. The tests will take anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes to run. DisktimerGS does not perform any WRITE operations and will not alter any data on any disk under test. In fact, the disk must be formatted and contain a ProDOS directory in order to run the tests. If the disk is partitioned, any single partition can be tested (the results are independent of partitioning) but the partition selected must be at least 9.9 Megabytes in size in order for the tests to run. DO NOT try to run DiskTimer from a floppy. It won't work. About the Results DiskTimerGS reports its results in seconds for each operation. The three tests performed are: READ Timing: This test performs a sequential READ of a number of 512 byte blocks to determine how fast the Hard Disk can transfer consecutive data. The factors that most effect this number are the Disk Interleave and Data Transfer rate of the drive. SEEK Timing: This test measures the time it takes to seek the R/W heads of the drive across 10 Megabytes of data. The results of this test are mainly governed by the Track-to-Track, Average Access, and Head Settling time of the drive. ADAPTER Timing: This test performs a repeated READ of a single block on the disk, measuring the overhead to receive data from the low-level disk interface through the ProDOS 16 high-level interface. Factors that effect this rating are the delays through the Host Adapter Card originating at the disk drive interface hardware and the Disk/Host interface firmware. In other words, it measures the efficiency of the SCSI Card or other controller Card used to operate the disk drive. Interpreting Results Compare your drive to the others listed in the DiskTimerGS comparison list (included in this download) to see how well your drive has performed. Submitting To the Comparison List The DiskTimerGS Comparison List included with this download will be frequently updated. To make DiskTimerGS an effective tool, I need your help in keeping this list as up to date as possible. If you have a hard disk drive that is not on the list, run DiskTimerGS and submit your test results so I can include it in the next update. Even if your drive is "Homebrew", it would be interesting to compare results to commercially available products. Run DiskTimerGS at least three times (The results may vary slightly depending upon the drive/controller tested). Submit all three test results (or an average of the three) along with your name, BBS ID, and any additional comments to support the test setup. Submit your data to one of my BBS ID's listed above. Thanks for your support. I hope you find DiskTimerGS an Independent and valuable aid in selecting one of the growing number of hard disk drives now available for the IIGS. -Joe Jaworski DiskTimerGS operates through the ProDOS 16 interface under GS/OS. It is not compatible with System Disks before version 4.0 and is not compatible with other models of the Apple II