The following graph shows the standard MacBench 4.0 "Disk" and "Pub. Disk" test scores for cache sizes ranging from 512k to 4 meg. Speed Doubler 2's "faster disk" setting was disabled during these tests. The stock 8500 Apple 2Gig drive is shown in each cache size for reference. The 8500 was running the PowerForce 250 card during all tests.

Since my 8500 stock Apple 2Gig drive is known to be slow and was about 80% full, I used a Seagate Barracuda (7200 rpm - ST32550N) drive as a comparison for the FWB tests. No attempt was made to optimize the drives.

Keep in mind the Barracuda performance is about twice what many stock 85/8600 drives deliver, with much faster Seek and Avg Access times as well, but the Cheetah still leads the way by a good margin in most tests. In addition, the Barracuda used a 1GB volume, vs a 2GB on the Cheetah. The smaller volume size helps performance, esp. on the random tests. But the Cheetah still delivers as much as 4X the performance of the Barracuda on the Apple Stock SCSI bus.