yeah the wd blacks are nice drives if you want them faster short stoke them
Actually, that's not completely true.
Short stroking drives means that you cut the size of the drive through software. For example you could cut both drives down to 500GB drives, so the OS will think you ahve a 500GB drive.
This will improve benchmark scores. Why? Simple. You're only benchmarking the fastest half of the disk. As you move inwards on the disk, (as it fills up), you lose perfomrance because the inside of the disk is not moving as fast as the outside of the disk. So the innermost part of the disk is the slowest and the outermost part of the disk is the fastest. If you cut the drive to 500GB, you're only using half of the physical disk. So the 'slowest' part will actually be in the middle of the disk, rather than the inside of the disk. And because the middle of the disk is faster than the innermost part of the disk, benchmarks will improve.
HOWEVER, this
DOES NOT improve performance. Why? Again, simple. The only performance gain you'll see is your
average performance will improve. Your maximum transfer rate will not improve. The disk has not physically gotten faster because you used half of its space. But the average transfer speed has gone up becsue you've eliminated the slower half of the disk. And that doesn't speed up the faster half, just the average.
Think of it this way. You want to average 4 numbers, 1, 2, 3 and 4. You're looking for the highest average possible. If you average all four numbers, you get 2.5. Cool. But if you want a higher average, why not cut out the smaller numbers, which bring the average down? So now, only average 3 and 4. You get 3.5 as an average. Awesome! You increased your average by removing the slower numbers.
BUT your numbers didn't get bigger. Your highest numbers is still 3 and 4. This is exactly what happns on the hard drive. 4 is the outside of the disk, which is the fastest, and 1 is the inside of the disk which is the slowest. If you short stroke a drive, you take out 1 and 2. Your average goes up, but you still have the same numbers, which means that you still have the same performance levels. Hopefully that makes sense.
In sum, short stroking a drive improves benchmark scores, but does not make the drives perform faster.
), do you think my stripe size has anything to do with performance?
thx write back cache enabed.
