On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 02:45:34PM +0200, Bruce Martin wrote:
> 
> 1. Differing times
> ==================
> If we take a new (never formatted) Maxtor drive, disklabel it and run newfs
> on the largest partition, it takes around 420s. (We have 75G drives that
> format in 200s, so this seems very long!). Then if we take the same drive,
> and run 'newfs' again on it, sometimes we get 420s, and sometimes 180s.
> Then, from the 3rd time we 'newfs' it onwards, we get 180s consistently.
> Does anybody know what the reason for this could be?

I'm not sure about the second time, but some drives specifically defer
creating the servo information until the disc is actually written to,
and this could account for the initial slowness.  You might try doing
`dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rwd0d bs=64k' once and then see how long the
newfs(8) takes.