DOS Tester v1.02
Disk Operational Speed Tester

DOS Tester is a quick and dirty disk speed checker that we at A&D have
(and still) use while developing our OS-M kernel and Universal NETwork
software. We wanted a way to test the speed of individual operations -
opens, writes, deletes - as well as a general seek-and-read test. Thus DOS
Tester came into being.

DOS Tester runs on any version of US TOS (and OS-M, too!) as of July 1,
1991 - and it should work on foreign versions too, but as we don't have
any foreign machines in-house, we can't guarantee that.

To run DOS Tester, just double-click on DOSTESTR.PRG. You will get a
dialog giving you all of the test options. Select Create/Close, Open/
Write, and Seek Test for the three tests. Select Write Test Log to write
out the test results to disk (to the drive/path you choose to test on).
The results will be written to a file called DOSTESTS, and any future
DOS Tester tests in that path will tack the new test results into the
existing DOSTESTS file.

You can choose the number of files to test with, and the size of each
file. 10 100K files time out quite differently that 100 10K files (it's 
true!). Just use the two edit fields in the upper right-hand corner of 
the dialog to enter your choices.

Then when you are ready, click on Run Test and a file selector will pop
up, prompting you for the choice of drive and path to run your tests on
(a heavily fragmented drive will give you poorer results). Click on OK
to run the tests, click on Cancel to abort the tests.

And for those who are curious, the timings are done using the system
200hz clock.

The Tests

1) DFREE: DOS Tester will start (always) by checking free space on a disk 
10 times. Why 10 times? Am I afraid the size might change? No. Just to
pump up the numbers.

2) Create/Close: DOS Tester will create a folder called DOSTESTS (to avoid
the 112 file limit of a root directory) and create everhowmanyfilesyouwant
(named TEST1, TEST2 - up to TEST350) and close each file after it has been
created. Why only 350 files? That's just a limit we imposed (there's a
256K limit on the max size of files too). If anyone wants higher limits,
let us know and we'll raise them ("How to contact us" info is at the
end of this text file. But for now, 350 files is a sane limit.

3) Open/Writes: DOS Tester will open each file in sequence and write
everhowmuchdatayouwant out to the file, and then close the file.

4) Deletes: DOS Tester will delete each file in sequence and remove
the folder.

5) Seek Test: DOS Tester will malloc a large chunk of memory and write
out a file (the size of the file is determined by the size of memory
available and how much free space is on the disk being written to). This
test reads 513 bytes from three points in the file - the beginning of
the file, the middle of the file and the end (minus 1024 bytes) of the
file, 10 times (again, to bump up the numbers). The sequence of head
movement goes - end to start to middle to start to end to middle.

That's all

Well, I believe that sums it all up. It's not the most perfect test in
the world, but a good test to add to your benchmark arsenal. Address
any comments to:

A&D Software
280 Peach Street
Merlin, OR 97532
USA

GEnie: ST-INFORMER
CompuServe 7007,3615
Phone: (503) 476-0071
Fax: (503) 479-1825

DOS Tester v1.02 was written in GFA BASIC 3.6 and is distributed as
FREEWARE.

FREEWARE rules:

Pass it Along.
You Can't Profit from Passing it Along.
You Must Include This Text File.

DOS Tester v1.02 and this text file is Copyright (c) 1990, 1991 by
Application & Design Software.