Hard drive speed

[ex_reven]

I have a RAID setup and I just ran HDD tach. The burst speed seems decent but the sequential read seems very slow...or am I paranoid?

Feel free to post your own benchmarks images/speeds too

 

[Kursah]

Well with my one 500gb SATA2 drive I average 54MB/s...I forget what burst is.

I'd say you're doing pretty damn good dude!

 

[Namslas90]

I have a RAID setup and I just ran HDD tach. The burst speed seems decent but the sequential read seems very slow...or am I paranoid?

Thats about right, the speed won't double in RAID. Seq-Read is dependant on DATA Density.

 

[DOM]

 

[nora.e]

Here's mine, though I have no idea what it means. Someone care to inturpret?

 

[ex_reven]

Thats about right, the speed won't double in RAID. Seq-Read is dependant on DATA Density.

I knew it wouldnt double in speed. I just expected around the 120-150mb/sec mark. Any increase is good though . Any way to further increase performance? (Apart from defrag and doing that "enhanced performance" thingy in properties).

 

[Chewy]

It does seem a tad low I get 105mb/s with my 2 drives.. I think the 320's use 2 heads from what I heard, maybe thats why. Still pwning though Raid owns.

 

[Kursah]

Kursah's Baraccuda 7200.9 500GB

Here's mine, I didn't break 52MB/s, but I usually average around 52-54. So I'm still close! But you can see how much faster your 500GB Raid is compared to my 500GB SATA2 drive.

 

[hat]

He's showing off

 

[ex_reven]

He's showing off

who?

 

[hat]

who?

Oh, you know who...

 

[ex_reven]

oh.
Im not, it was honestly a serious question. Pinchy said he got 150mb/sec, and i was just wondering why my setup didnt reach that.

 

[DRDNA]

In raid 0 it does just about double ! At least on all my arrays it does (that is in Raid-0)
And yes thats about right for your arrayI am running the Perps and there sata2's running on a sata 1 mobo my burst suck azz but thats cuz my mobo wasnt for hard drive speed more for overclockin the ram and cpu....on my two 250 gigs in raid 0 =ing 500ish gig array give me this and the avverage is double for my mobo.

 

[ex_reven]

Looks pretty good. Do you recon the stripe size in the raid affects performance a heap?
My stripes are 120kb Im pretty sure (or maybe 64, meh) it was the default size.

 

[DRDNA]

mine is the default as well

 

[ex_reven]

Is it possible to change the stripe size? Or would that require a format...
Id like to experiment with different sizes

 

[DRDNA]

it would require a full reformat and not the quick option either

 

[Chewy]

I got 32bkb stripe size, it depends on the avg file in your system like if you want a little boost in gaming performance use smaller if the files you use alot are bigger (movies?) use a larger stripe size... I dont see it making a huge differnce though.

If you ahve the option you can disable some cache and stuff listed in the vista tweaks thread.. my raid controller does not let me do that though.. but the one prob with doing that is if you dont have a back-up power supply and your houses power fails you lose all your data and have to reformat.. so to do it you should have a battery back-up power supply.

I guess disabling that thing gave some people a nice performance gain, but its not guaranteed to,

 

[DRDNA]

Is it possible to change the stripe size? Or would that require a format...
Id like to experiment with different sizes

Or you may be able to ghost over the array to a big enough single then reformatt using desired stripe size then ghost the drive back from the single on to the newly striped array... I am certain i have done this in the past.

 

[mas0n]

ex_reven

You have a bottleneck somewhere, there is no way you have a consistent read speed across the first 450GB of that array.

 

[Kursah]

Ex, did you pull the jumpers for SATA2 mode? Judging from burst speed you did, but I know on my 'Cuda, I had to remove a jumper that sets the HDD to SATA 1 as default. Just a thought, but I think it's a wasted thought considering your speed. It's still damn fast.

 

[ex_reven]

ex_reven

You have a bottleneck somewhere, there is no way you have a consistent read speed across the first 450GB of that array.

Do you mean how it doesnt vary alot? Why would that be impossible? (Theyr fairly new drives and they only ever have about 50-60gb of space used at any one time if that makes a diff)

Ex, did you pull the jumpers for SATA2 mode? Judging from burst speed you did, but I know on my 'Cuda, I had to remove a jumper that sets the HDD to SATA 1 as default. Just a thought, but I think it's a wasted thought considering your speed. It's still damn fast.

Wasnt aware they had jumpers. Well I did think they had jumpers, but when i looked into my case the other day I saw what looked like a place for jumpers, but when I used my tweezers I couldnt seem to find any bridging piece that goes on the jumpers. Maybe if i took them out of my case I could have a better look, not atm though.

 

[Kursah]

The jumpers are very, very small...very small..did I mention they are small? I had to use a small pick to get it out! I lost it immediately! That may help you. My performance increased a little, mostly my burst which went from about 120MB/s to 255MB/s. My overall increased a few MB/s. I wish I could get more out of it, but I don't think there's really anything I can do, I have a partition for Windows Vista that's approx 20GB, and then the second partition for programs/games/downloads, etc. I may get another and go raid someday, but 500GB is sufficient for me ATM.

 

[ex_reven]

I feel so clean lol...Im gonna defrag and rerun the test

 

[mas0n]

Do you mean how it doesnt vary alot? Why would that be impossible? (Theyr fairly new drives and they only ever have about 50-60gb of space used at any one time if that makes a diff)

If you are not sufferring from a bottleneck the results in HD Tach should always follow an arc. This is because the entire disk is read from start (outside) to finish (inside) and the outside tracks will always read faster because they are spinning at a higher rate of speed than the inner tracks.