Re: Disk Parameter Tuning Utility?

["Kent Rollins" <kentr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't know if it checks the kinds of things you mentioned, but about 13
years ago I used SpinRite by Gibson Research (www.grc.com) to change the
interleave factor on some machines at the office where I was working.  It
sped up performance by 150% to 400% in every case.  It also analyzed things
like bad sectors and although it took between 2 and 48 hours per machine,
you could stop the process at any time because it worked track by track and
apparently the drive and the computer have no problem functioning if
different tracks are at different interleaves.  I haven't used SpinRite
since, just because I'm not one to obsess about machine performance issues.
I get my machine running and it's pass/fail after that.  I think SpinRite is
at version 5.0 now and you should check it out.  Steve Gibson used to
handcode everything in assembler so it was always small and fast.

Kent


-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Fulks <bfulks@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, June 07, 2000 10:57 AM
Subject: Disk Parameter Tuning Utility?


Slightly off topic but perhaps of general interest.

I recently was running some benchmarks on the performance of TS4.0
and TS2000i and discovered several computer settings that were not
optimum:

   > On an HP Pavilion 8550C Win98 machine, the Device
     Manager:Properties:Settings panel had DMA unchecked.
     I checked it and the disk transfer rate increased
     from 5 to 13 MB/sec and a TradeStation benchmark
     improved the optimization speed by almost a factor
     of two. (Somewhat surprising for a commercial machine,
     I would think.)

   > On a custom built Win2000 machine, the Device
     Manager:Disk Drives:Disk Properties panel had Write
     Cache enabled but the write cache was not enabled
     in the BIOS. I made them consistent and the disk
     write performance went from 8 to 23 MB/sec and the
     TradeStation benchmark was again a factor of two
     faster.

All of this makes me wonder what other settings on my various
machines are not optimum - hence my question:

Does anyone know of a utility program that can analyze your machine
to see if all of the various settings are correct? (I have done some
searching but have not located such a thing.)

Alternately, is there some web site reference that discusses what the
proper settings are?

Thanks.

Bob Fulks