25 year old hard drives benchmarked with ReadSpeed!

[Tig77]

Hi everyone,

For fun, I thought I'd copy the ReadSpeed executable over to my old Pentium 100 MHz (which I still use at least once a day!) root directory, exit out of Windows 95 and restart in MS-DOS 6,22 mode and bypass my autoexec.bat and config.sys files by hitting F5 during boot. ReadSpeed benchmarked my two drives, one a Maxtor 3.2 GB and the other a Western Digital 1.2 GB, if I combined both of those it would be smaller than a modern USB thumb drive!

Anyway I thought just for fun, I'd share my results from my blazing fast old reliable drives:

  +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | ReadSpeed: Hyper-accurate mass storage read-performance benchmark. rel 1 |
  |  Benchmarked values are in megabytes read per second at five locations.  |
  +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
 80  3.2GB Maxtor 83201A6                  7.1     6.4     5.2     4.9     4.5
 81  1.2GB WDC AC31200F                    3.0     2.9     2.9     2.8     2.7

                  Benchmarked: Tuesday, 2020-12-29 at 20:04
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   See the ReadSpeed forums at forums.grc.com for help and community support.

It took a good 10-15 minutes to benchmark these drives. The Western Digital drive is a few years older than the Maxtor. The Maxtor is partitioned into a 2 GB and a 1.2 GB partition due to Windows 95a's older file system not supporting drives over 2 GB. It's just incredible the speed difference of modern drives, but my old computer didn't feel slow back in the day!

I still use SpinRite on these drives every once in a while, and I honestly think they enjoy the workout!

Happy New Year!

Shawn

 

[DarkwinX]

On that last one each of the 1gb transfers will significantly overlap with the next. Guess that's why the measured transfer speed is so close.

 

[Steve]

On that last one each of the 1gb transfers will significantly overlap with the next. Guess that's why the measured transfer speed is so close.

An astute observation, DarkwinX. You're exactly right. I'm kinda glad that my math is all working right, there, since that's a case that was never tested!