Low End Mac Reader Specials

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Low End Mac Benchmarks

Mac SE/30

Dan Knight - 2000.11.21 - Tip Jar

SE/30The SE/30 uses a 16 MHz 68030 CPU and 16 MHz 68882 FPU, just like the Mac IIx and IIcx. The hard drive on this SE/30 is an Apple-branded Quantum LP80S formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5.

The drive was tested with Norton and optimized before benchmarking.

Remember that benchmarks are arbitrary. They measure certain types of performance that may or may not reflect the way you work.

Speedometer 3.06

The computer was tested on 8 October 2000 under System 7.5.5 using both an external 160 MB hard drive and the same internal 80 MB drive used with Speedometer 4.02.

cache    CPU   graphics  disk    math
 32KB    4.25    3.71    2.44    6.70
 64KB    4.24    3.71    2.43    6.63
128KB    4.25    3.69    2.45    6.65
256KB    4.25    3.71    2.44    6.70

Disk tests for the internal drive were slightly lower at 2.15 (32k), 2.25 (64k), 2.25 (128k), and 2.14 (256k).

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. In fact, disk tests are fairly close together, too.

Speedometer 4.02

The system was tested on 17 June 1999 and 21 Nov. 2000 under System 7.5.5. Results are relative to a Quadra 605, which rates 1.0. Numbers rounded off to two decimal places.

These numbers compare performance at different cache settings.

cache    CPU   graphics  disk    math
 32KB    0.26    0.16    0.77    0.96
 64KB    0.26    0.16    0.70    0.98
128KB    0.26    0.16    0.77    0.97
256KB    0.26    0.16    0.76    0.97
ST2.1S   0.26    0.16    1.46    0.97

The final test is with our benchmark drive, an external Quantum ST2.1S with System 7.5.5 installed and extensions off. This test demonstrates that the Quantum LP80S inside the SE/30 falls well short of the computer's SCSI potential.

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. As above, with this particular setup, cache size very little difference --the drop is only about 5% between the highest and lowest scores.

Compared with the IIcx, which has the same CPU and FPU, the SE/30 offers virtually identical performance except for graphics. There, because the SE/30 uses RAM for video while the IIcx has a separate video card, the IIcx benchmarks roughly 50% faster (0.25 vs. 0.16).

Hard Drive and Memory Speed

The newest addition to our benchmark suite is TimeDrive 1.3 (available here), which measures drive throughput. This can test a floppy, Zip, hard drive, or RAM Disk. TimeDrive is fairly primitive; the benefit of that is being able to run it on very old Macs.

The Quantum LP80S is a older, slower SCSI hard drive that was common when the SE/30 was on the market. We also tested our default external drive, a Quantum Fireball ST2.1S. Unfortunately, we were unable to run our ramBunctious RAM Disk benchmark, since the SE/30 bombed every time we tried to run it. (Numbers are KB/sec.)

drive              write     read 
Quantum LP80S      1,180K   1,194K
Quantum ST2.1S     1,497K   1,850K

Tests with other Macs show the ST2.1S runs faster then 4 Mbps, so the 1,497K write and 1,850K read ceilings seems to be a limit on the SE/30's SCSI throughput. The write performance is 28% better than the Classic II, the less expensive model that replaced the SE/30. Read performance is an impressive 35% higher than on the Classic II.

These tests also show why the SE/30 was a popular network server. Even with the old Quantum LP80S, with a throughput of approximately 9.25 Mbps (average of read and write times 8) it could move data to and from the drive as fast as it could move over the network. With any faster drive, the 10 Mbps network is the bottleneck.

Go to the SE/30 profile.

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