bbraun, I certainly appreciate your time in testing CF solutions versus spinning platter drives with Norton "System Info."
It is interesting to see from your results that even the rather speedy SanDisk Ultra II did not beat the Cheetah in any of the tests except Random Read, and even then it wasn't an enormous difference. Overall the SanDisk Ultra II was a few points slower than the spinning platter drive (albeit a fast one).
The low end 8GB card you tested scored less than half of the SanDisk and Cheetah, although it did marginally better on the Random Read test. But clearly, that 8GB flash is a choice none of us would prefer in terms of performance.
It is interesting to note that the SanDisk Ultra II CF card is rated at 15MB/sec speeds for both READ and WRITE. You would think that should saturate the rather slow SCSI bus on the SE/30.
I wish to point out that while this test was only conducted on two different flash cards, it does confirm what I personally felt prior to the test. Namely, that given the specifications of the flash card, one would naturally think that the SanDisk Ultra II 4GB CF should saturate the SCSI bus of the SE/30 and be the winner over spinning platter drives in every test. But the fact that a spinning platter drive, the Cheetah, was in fact marginally faster than the SanDisk and winning all the drive tests except one, indicates that we cannot simply look at the flash card specifications alone. Benchmarks really do help us determine the performance of CF solutions for our vintage Macs.
Further benchmarks performed on spinning platter drives are available for viewing from this LEM SE/30 Page.
If you want to run your own tests but lack the software (or the knowledge where to download it freely), just PM me.
Thanks again, bbraun.
It is interesting to see from your results that even the rather speedy SanDisk Ultra II did not beat the Cheetah in any of the tests except Random Read, and even then it wasn't an enormous difference. Overall the SanDisk Ultra II was a few points slower than the spinning platter drive (albeit a fast one).
The low end 8GB card you tested scored less than half of the SanDisk and Cheetah, although it did marginally better on the Random Read test. But clearly, that 8GB flash is a choice none of us would prefer in terms of performance.
It is interesting to note that the SanDisk Ultra II CF card is rated at 15MB/sec speeds for both READ and WRITE. You would think that should saturate the rather slow SCSI bus on the SE/30.
I wish to point out that while this test was only conducted on two different flash cards, it does confirm what I personally felt prior to the test. Namely, that given the specifications of the flash card, one would naturally think that the SanDisk Ultra II 4GB CF should saturate the SCSI bus of the SE/30 and be the winner over spinning platter drives in every test. But the fact that a spinning platter drive, the Cheetah, was in fact marginally faster than the SanDisk and winning all the drive tests except one, indicates that we cannot simply look at the flash card specifications alone. Benchmarks really do help us determine the performance of CF solutions for our vintage Macs.
Further benchmarks performed on spinning platter drives are available for viewing from this LEM SE/30 Page.
If you want to run your own tests but lack the software (or the knowledge where to download it freely), just PM me.
Thanks again, bbraun.