timing a hard drive in unixpc

[John B. Milton]

In article <WJC.89Dec1203314 at ho5cad.ho5cad.ATT.COM> wjc at ho5cad.ATT.COM (Bill Carpenter) writes:
...
>In other words, if I have a drive that claims average seek times of,
>say 28ms, is there are way to measure if it's in the right ballpark?
>I'm not interested (much) in measuring stuff like rotation speed of
>the platters (sounds like an oscilloscope deal, huh?).

Sure, but it's crude

1. Shutdown UNIX.
2. Boot the floppy diag disk.
3. Press [Return]
4. At the "> " prompt enter "s4test"
5. At the "expert> " prompt enter "6,0" to re-cal the disk
6. At the "expert> " prompt enter "6,5" to do 1000 random seeks.
7. Time out step 6, repeat 5 and 6 a few times

I've never done this, and I don't have good documentation on the drives
I've got to compare measured values aginst claims.

Ok, everybody **WHO KNOWS WHAT KIND OF DRIVE THEY HAVE** do the above
random seek test 5 times and send me the time for all 5. Don't forget step 5
between each test, or you'll get crazy times. I'll run it on all the old 5M
drives I've got and send out a summary. DO IT RIGHT NOW, or I'll never get
it out! I'll cut it off in a week. The above test is NOT a blind seek, after
each seek, a header is read to verify that the head got to the right track.

John
-- 
John Bly Milton IV, jbm at uncle.UUCP, n8emr!uncle!jbm at osu-cis.cis.ohio-state.edu
(614) h:252-8544, w:469-1990; N8KSN, AMPR: 44.70.0.52; Don't FLAME, inform!