SE/30 Storage Benchmarks

This documents Norton Utilities 4.0.3 System Info disk benchmarks on an SE/30 with several different storage devices, and a couple other systems thrown in for comparison. System Info requires the system have AppleTalk disabled, the disk cache set to 128k, and the display set to 256 colors/greys. Since my SE/30 is not capable of 256 colors/greys, it was left at the stock 1bit setting.

The Devices

Testing was done with the following storage devices in the SE/30:

Additionally a PowerBook 520c with a stock drive, and a G4 AGP with stock PATA drive are thrown in for comparison purposes.

All CompactFlash cards were tested with an R-IDSC-E SCSI to IDE converter and an IDE to CF adapter. The R-IDSC-E was configured for SCSI-2 using PIO mode on the IDE side as none of the devices supported UDMA transfer modes.

The Results


Device Overall Random Read 1K Read 4K Read 16 K Read 64K Read 256K Read Random Write 1K Write 4K Write 16K Write 64K Write 256K Write
G4 AGP 1556.3 2533.1 3242 11535 18209 18119 18197 494.4 2947.7 9960 18198 18077 18064
G4 AGP w/PATA SanDisk UltraII 821 1358 1727 4927 9647 12757 13221 253.9 646.1 5527 8988 10215 10414
G4 AGP w/ATTO SCSI SanDisk UltraII 450 956 1200 2845 4493 5257 5364 227 508 1520 3264 4359 4444
G4 AGP w/ATTO SCSI Cheetah 348 329.7 1709 2780 3319 3485 3531 323.6 1744.8 2802 3319 3490 3533
Cheetah 146.9 221.8 544 1075 1421 1547 1581 93.4 308 706 1042 1184 1225
SanDisk UltraII 144.2 293.9 467 984 1369 1520 1553 83.2 274.9 668 1034 1043 1198
Quantum ProDrive 105.0 89.3 339 779 1244 1510 1547 47.0 210.2 587 1102 1246 1264
PM6100/60 (reference system) 100.0 87.4 291 917 1968 2037 2061 23.4 69.2 251 736 1421 1855
PowerBook 520c 76.8 69.4 250 575 973 1183 1312 48.8 60.1 209 538 821 1038
Kingston Standard 8GB 63.4 207.0 289 437 501 520 524 68.8 145.4 324 444 491 493

A Word on the Tests

The Cheetah and SanDisk UltraII CF card were both tested with newly created filesystems on a 2000000K volume. The others were volumes of various sizes in whatever state they happened to be in when tested.

Some of these tests were run multiple times, although not reflected here. The variation between runs was as high as 12% in the case of the Kingston Standard CF card. To get more accurate numbers, each test should be run multiple times.

Low End Mac also did a benchmark of drives in the SE/30 here. They used a benchmark program called TimeDrive 1.3 which does not seem to be available.

Updates

Updated to include the SanDisk Ultra II CF card tested using the IDE-CF adapter configured on the primary PATA bus as a slave on the G4 AGP machine
Updated to include the SanDisk Ultra II CF card tested using an ATTO PCI SCSI card, R-IDSC-E SCSI-IDE converter, and IDE-CF adapter on the G4 AGP machine
Updated to include the Seagate Cheetah disk using an ATTO PCI SCSI card on the G4 AGP machine