KryoFlux - Transfer Rate Testing

2009-10-28

Time to test a few disks, both DD and HD ones, just to get an idea of the average transfer rate.

Windows Commander on HD disk gives an average of 380 KiB. Another HD disk we sampled for over an hour without problems at 450 KiB.

DD is around 190-220 KiB, depending on the disk used:

• Stryx, Psygnosis - 220 KiB
• Turrican 2 - 260 KiB
• Fate Gates of Dawn - 220 KiB
• Paranoia Complex - 200 KiB
• Unreal - 200 KiB
• Silkworm - 230 KiB.

It works fine so far!

We wondered if XCopy’s wipe/zap track function filled an entire track with zeroes; that is worst case in terms of number of flux changes required. If it did, we would get about 250 KiB for DD and 500 KiB for HD. Unfortunately doing that only seems to deliver 150 KiB of throughput, so obviously it is not full of zeros. We’ll have to try another program, or write one.

Now it is time to add the OOB (Out Of Band) index information, re-test and then hopefully that’s it for a while, as far as the reading firmware code is concerned. We will also need functionality to query the exact sampling rate, and other things like that, as we don’t want guess or hard code it. This is simple though, as it is already available. This information is already used when calculating delays, timer values, signals, etc. Nothing is hard coded in the firmware.