Copyright: « 1994 miro Computer Products AG


miro HD Speed Utility

With this utility you can test the transferspeed of your harddisk(s).

For detailed information click on the items below.

How to use

Interpreting the results

Hints


 How to use

This program writes a 10 MB file to your harddisk and after that reads it again. For both actions it calculates the transferrate from/to the harddisk. The only thing the user has to do is to specify the disk which shall be tested. This can be done in the menu Drives. After selecting a drive the testprocess starts. If there is not enough diskspace on the specified drive you will get an errormessage. If the free diskspace is less then 30MB you will get a warning that the testresult could be inaccurate. This is just a warning, not an error.


Interpreting the results

After the testprocedure is finished the testresults will be shown in a dialogbox. There are two different numbers in this dialogbox. The first tells the datarate for writing a file to disk. This number is extremly important for capturing video to disk. The second number is the datarate for reading a file from disk. This rate is important for playback of a captured file. Normally this rate is much higher than the datarate for writing a file.

For fullsize video with full framerate (25 fps for PAL; 30 fps for NTSC) the writing datarate should be at least 350 KB/s. This datarate is high enough to write compressed video (e.g. captured with miroVIDEO DC1 tv od miroVIDEO D1 using miroVIDEO XL). If you are capturing audio also then you must take into account that the audio datastream increases the necessary datarate to the disk.


 Hints

The datarate is influenced by several circumstances. We can give you some ideas what to do to increase the datarate of your harddisk. Since the circumstances are too complex we can not give you a recipe how to tune your datarate.

-	If you are using an IDE-harddisk (also known as AT-harddisk) you can improve the datarate if you are using WINDOWS for Workgroups 3.11 instead of WINDOWS 3.1. With WfW 3.11 you can select an enhanced 32-bit-access to the harddisk. Unfortuanelly this does not help you with SCSI-drives.

-	For SCSI-drives you can improve the datarate if you are using ASPI for WINDOWS. You can do this in the following manner if you have a SCSI-contollerboard with an Adaptec-chip (or compatible). In your CONFIG.SYS you include aspi4dos.sys (or aspi7dos.sys) as a device driver. Furtheron you copy vaspi.386 and winaspi.dll into your WINDOWS directory. After rebooting things should work.

-	Defragment your harddisk using tools like DEFRAG from MS-DOS 6. If the disk in unfragmented then a new file can be written in consecutive areas on the disk and there is no need to reposition the heads, which takes a long time.


Copyright  (c)1994  by

miro Computer Products AG,

Carl-Miele-Str.4,

D-38112 Braunschweig