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Stroking 7200.11

  • Thread starter Thread starter diesel700
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diesel700

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Was looking at the Seagate 7200.11 disk and how short stroking it to 300gb supposedly gives better or the same performance as a VRaptor. Now supposedly you use the 1.5tb model which came out after the ones with the dodgy firmware.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

A quick google seems to be full of people on forums saying that 'short stroking' is the same as partitioning, but apparently its not.

Has anyone tried it on the 1.5tb 7200.11 Seagate and would it work better on the 500GB plattered 1tb 7200.12 disk, either 500gb or 1tb flavour ?

Working to a tight budget for a system for photo editing for a guy replacing a Mac G5 and most of the budget has gone on Core i7 and a P6T Deluxe, so want the quickest disk setup for the least cash (doesn't everyone). The guy who is having the machine wants to cut the time it take him to edit files and he shuffles lots of large Raw images about and makes huge photostitches of landcapes and stuff.
 
I think a better solution would be to RAID0 two 500GB 7200.12 drives.
 
i dont see how this could be bad
 
Ok, I could be wrong here...

Short stroking seems to get the same result as partitioning. Short stroking makes the drive appear smaller than it really is. So benchmarks test only a small portion of the drive. Partitioning achieves the same thing. You're only using a certain smaller portion of the drive. The only difference is that benchmarks won't show this because benchmarks test the whole drive. If a benchmark tested only 1 partition, you should get the same results of short stroking it. There's no reason why it wouldn't work.

The best candidates for short stroking are drives with a very high data density. I would think that having more platters would increase size of the 'insanely fast part'. Imagine a 500GB drive with 1 platter. A 50 GB partition would extend 10% into the disk. However using a 1TB drive with 2 platters, a 50GB partition would only extend into 5% of each disk. The 1TB drive would be faster because the partition has more data closer to the edge of the disk.

Another consideration would be to get a WD Raptor. Not the newer VelociRaptor, but the original Raptor. It certainly doesn't have the thoroput of modern drives (Average 72MB/s) but it does have a wicked access time of ~8ms. It's not SSD class, but it still has and edge over 7200rpm drives in random access. I would think for a temp disk, you would need high random access performance. The 74GB Raptor sells used for about $40-50 and the 150GB version sells for around $80. For the price, I think it's a worthy consideration.
 
angelkiller said:
Ok, I could be wrong here...

Short stroking seems to get the same result as partitioning. Short stroking makes the drive appear smaller than it really is. So benchmarks test only a small portion of the drive. Partitioning achieves the same thing. You're only using a certain smaller portion of the drive. The only difference is that benchmarks won't show this because benchmarks test the whole drive. If a benchmark tested only 1 partition, you should get the same results of short stroking it. There's no reason why it wouldn't work.

The best candidates for short stroking are drives with a very high data density. I would think that having more platters would increase size of the 'insanely fast part'. Imagine a 500GB drive with 1 platter. A 50 GB partition would extend 10% into the disk. However using a 1TB drive with 2 platters, a 50GB partition would only extend into 5% of each disk. The 1TB drive would be faster because the partition has more data closer to the edge of the disk.
Click to expand...

Yep. +1
 
Thanks for all the input. I found a thread over at SPCR that sort of explains it, but they are wondering why the guy int he original article picked such a disk to do it on, as similar or better results could be had off something like a WD 640gb.

So to make this very simple I should just buy the quickest disk and not do any storking or poking to it...is the fastest desktop drive (exclusing expensive v.raptors) the 500Gb per platter Seagate 7200.12 ? Does anyone know which is quicker, 500GB or 1TB model ?
 
I think the 640 Black holds the performance crown still IIRC.....
 
diesel700 said:
Was looking at the Seagate 7200.11 disk and how short stroking it to 300gb supposedly gives better or the same performance as a VRaptor. Now supposedly you use the 1.5tb model which came out after the ones with the dodgy firmware.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

A quick google seems to be full of people on forums saying that 'short stroking' is the same as partitioning, but apparently its not.

Has anyone tried it on the 1.5tb 7200.11 Seagate and would it work better on the 500GB plattered 1tb 7200.12 disk, either 500gb or 1tb flavour ?

Working to a tight budget for a system for photo editing for a guy replacing a Mac G5 and most of the budget has gone on Core i7 and a P6T Deluxe, so want the quickest disk setup for the least cash (doesn't everyone). The guy who is having the machine wants to cut the time it take him to edit files and he shuffles lots of large Raw images about and makes huge photostitches of landcapes and stuff.
Click to expand...


For me short stroking has the same effect as partitioning( I think LOL ), if you short stroke an HDD, the mechnical arms now are limited to move thus giving access time much faster i agree with that, but its gonna be downsized leaving unused disk space inaccessible:shadedshu, how about just partion it to a lower capacity if you want to parallel the effect of the short stroke while you can still use the other partition as storage or OS2.3.4.5.6, same effect of a short stroke mechanical arm movement on drive C:\ but can still access the other partitions right?



Edit: that explains on my faster booting times on OS 1 than my gaming OS 2, no matter how i tried experimenting on everything, my OS 2 is 4-5 seconds late
on my OS 1 ( C:\20 GB OS 1 D:\60 GB OS 2 E:\80 GB Storage)
 
Last edited:
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