Should this disk be so slow?

[Cliff Olling]

We recently installed a Maxtor XT-8760E 760Mb unformatted disk as sd1 on
our 3/160C, which is running 3.5.  We've noticed that it's too slow for
some of our applications which use the A/D conversion board we've
installed.  For example, I "touched" 900 new files in a directory I just
made on the disk, and it took about 9 minutes to do "rm *" in that
directory.  Our existing disk still functions at it's normal
fast-enough-for-us speed, where the same operation takes about 90 seconds.
Also, perhaps since they are on the same controller, any use of the new
disk makes use of the original disk equally slow.  To summarize, we have:

				cyl	alt	heads	sec/track
sd0:	Micropolis 1355		1018	2	8	34
sd1:	Maxtor 8760E		1624	3	15	48
Emulex MD21 ESDI Controller attached to the SCSI Bus

And the question is, is it supposed to be so slow, or is there something
we should have done differently?

Clifford Olling, olling at tcgould.tn.cornell.edu, Cornell University
Modern Languages and Linguistics Phonetics Lab
cornell!plab!olling