HD Tach Benchmarks

[ex_reven]

I wonder if the presence of the third disk contributes alot to performance...
I have 2 7200.10 with 128k stripe and I only ever reached about the 140mb mark max.

 

[t_ski]

...but in the mean time feast your eyes on this! (haha it's my iPod Classic 80GB)

That's pathetic

I realized that I forgot to remove the jumper to enable SATA2. That helped a little bit, as it brought the burst up about 50MB/s and the overall reads up about 6MB/s.

Now, obviously I won't be using the JMicron or the Silicon Image controllers if I go to Raid three of these drives, as none of them support more than two drives. My only option is the ICH7R or an add-in card.

 

[t_ski]

I wonder if the presence of the third disk contributes alot to performance...
I have 2 7200.10 with 128k stripe and I only ever reached about the 140mb mark max.

If you have two drives giving you about 140 MB/s reads, then you would probably get about 200-210MB/s reads with three drives. Four would get you 260-280MB/s reads...

 

[nflesher87]

yeah, performance is fairly linear when it comes to RAID0

t I hadn't even thought to mention taking those out haha that was the first thing I did to mine
as for your controller that ICH7R should be all you need, an add-in is overkill and unnecessary IMO

 

[Wile E]

as for your controller that ICH7R should be all you need, an add-in is overkill and unnecessary IMO

Unless you're like me, and constantly changing hardware (unwillingly. lol). Saves you from having to rebuild your array every time.

 

[nflesher87]

Unless you're like me, and constantly changing hardware (unwillingly. lol). Saves you from having to rebuild your array every time.

I suppose, though it's not that difficult, usually they transfer over with no problem between onboard intel controllers

 

[t_ski]

Unless you're like me, and constantly changing hardware (unwillingly. lol). Saves you from having to rebuild your array every time.

That's what I was thinking. Plus, the one I'm looking at (here) has:

PCI Express x1 (x4, x8 and x16 slot compatible)
SATA II and SATA I hard drive support
Online Capacity Expansion and Online RAID Level Migration (OCE/ORLM)
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)
SAF-TE enclosure management
Hard drive activity and Failed LED support
Staggered drive spin-up support
Hot swap and hot spare
Write-through and write-back cache support
Quick and Background initialization for quick RAID configuration
Online array roaming
BIOS booting support (INT13)
64bit LBA for over 2TB support
Automatic RAID rebuild of failed drive
S.M.A.R.T drive monitoring for status and reliability
Browser-based RAID management software
Command Line Interface (CLI)
SMTP for email notification

SMART, SMTP, Staggered spin-up and a few others are just a few of those things that could be really useful that you don't get with built-in controllers.

I looked at my funds, and I would need to sell all three Raptors to buy the card and two more Seagates, and that only gets me a raid 0 or 5 array. I would prefer a raid 0 array for the OS & games, and a raid 1 array for important data, pics, music, etc.

Anyone want to make me an offer on the three 36GB Raptors? lol

 

[t_ski]

I suppose, though it's not that difficult, usually they transfer over with no problem between onboard intel controllers

But if you don't go from one Intel solution to another, you're screwed. I went from a SiL 2112 to an NF 4 and almost lost everything. Thanks the powers that be for Raid Reconstructor and Get Data Back.

 

[nflesher87]

to each his own, I'd never spend $100+ on something my motherboard already has

 

[Wile E]

to each his own, I'd never spend $100+ on something my motherboard already has

I plan on it when funds allow a card and more drives. If you buy the right card, it completely offloads the cpu.

 

[t_ski]

If it gave you better performance I think it would. I think that's why you have 3 x 320 GB drives in raid 0, instead of two drives in raid 0 or just a single drive. Same reason why you have a quad core instead of a dual core.

Besides, it's got a lot of things your mobo doesn't have...

 

[nflesher87]

I have 3 drives mainly because I was able to get good deals on the 320s and I assumed I'd need the space which I'm finding probably won't be so haha
and I got the quad for a few reasons, performance, folding, and OCing

 

[ex_reven]

My mobo runs ICH8R and im pretty sure it supports almost every raid type possible.
From memory it does RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 3, 5 and 10

 

[Deleted member 3]

to each his own, I'd never spend $100+ on something my motherboard already has

Enjoy your onboard video.

 

[ex_reven]

Enjoy your onboard video.

You never fail to make me lol

 

[nflesher87]

lol Dan I should've stated that more clearly, though I have to point out that my Abit IP35 Pro doesn't have onboard video so HAH

 

[t_ski]

No, you wouldn't even consider an on-board video solution because you want something that provides real performance. Same thing.

And if you only are using the three drives because you thought you'd need the space, why aren't you running them in JBOD? Simple, because Raid 0 performs much better. I'm not bashing you, but just trying to remind you that this is what we're all about here - performance. There are guys out there that swear by and live only by add-in boards, because they know the difference.

 

[nflesher87]

I guess it's all personal preference,
regarding VGA, that's a completely different story and I should've stated that comment better before haha
as for the controller, all I'm saying is I wanted space and performance, my motherboard already has a decently performing RAID controller and I don't have to pay any more for what I believe would be a relatively negligible increase in performance
for those of you that also want it for the ease of transfer in addition to the other benefits I say more power to you if you have the money to spare
Personally I would rather put that $100+ into something such as video card, memory, cpu etc

 

[t_ski]

That's true - everybody needs something different.

But take a look at it this way. Say your three drives each give 66 MB/s reads, combined for a total of 200 MB/s. What if an add-in board gave you 10-20MB/s more per drive? So instead of 200 MB/s, you were getting 230-260 MB/s - would that make it worth more to you? Granted, I saw a huge difference when going from one drive to two in Raid 0, and as you go up the performance increase gets lower. But since the hard drive is the slowest component of a modern PC, any improvement you can make in the data transfer would be worthwhile, at least IMHO. Of course, I'd spend $300-500 on a decent solution, maybe more, if I had the money.

 

[Steevo]

The Intel ICHR7 has more bandwidth than you can shake a stick at. It will not be the bottleneck. It may be a limiting factor in other ways that you may or may not notice, like minimal CPU useage, or ability to create advanced RAID arrays.



I believe we need additional benchmarks for disk performance. Such as application load time. Something independant of other hardware used, something consistant. We have too many variables with this test.



A fresh restart and a video of a steam load.
A video of a few game level loads.
A video of a few applications loads.
A video of a file move.


Etc....




Any other ideas?

 

[Dawgdoc]

I just found this thread

4 X 320gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 in matrix RAID 0/5.

Here is the RAID 0 part....top that!

 

[nflesher87]

that doesn't make sense...refer to my 3x 320 7200.10s in RAID0 on page 7...

 

[Dawgdoc]

that doesn't make sense...refer to my 3x 320 7200.10s in RAID0 on page 7...

Yes I see....much lower it looks like. Maybe its time for a defrag or rebuild the array?

As I said, Im running a Matrix Dual Array 0/5 with volume write-back caching enabled so maybe that is a factor. I have 4 drives to your 3, but that part should only be a very small difference......
EDIT: 64k stripe to your 32k too.
EDIT #2: HDtach DOES certainly work in Vista. You just need to run it as an administrator. Perhaps this one you need to disable driver signing as well I cannot remember as I always disable driver signing when I reboot.

How do you have your array set up?

Here is another I just ran a moment ago.

 

[nflesher87]

I'm not familiar dual arrays off hand
Mine is a simple RAID 0 on the intel ICH9R integrated into my Abit IP35 Pro

 

[Dawgdoc]

Intel Matrix Storage Technology

Great stuff. Worth looking at. Basically, you need 4HDs and you put 2 arrays across the 4 drives, instead of 2 in 1 array, and 2 in another.
EDIT: I think I mispoke here. You need 4 HD to do a 0/5, but you can do a 0/1 with only 2HDs.

This gives you the benefit of using the fastest part of each HD for your RAID 0, making your RAID 0 more efficient and quicker. Then the rest you use for your storage (RAID 1, 5, whatever) and it doesnt really matter if its all the slower parts because.....well its just storage.

Check out the link, and there is plenty of other stuff on the net regarding Matrix RAID stuff too. Damn good read here too.