hard drives & raid - benchmark and compare!

[soundx98]

Unfortunately the answer is NO

I know of no program that will read HDD temps in RAID 0

[red930]

good thing i ask. thanks Soundx98

[Guest LithoTech]

From the Adaptec website:

 

 

The card isn't a traditional raid card in the sense that you cannot plug devices directly on to it. The 2000S seems to be a logic card that works with the motherboard onboard connectors. That's why it requires EMRL or RAIDOS. You won't be able to use this on your desktop mobo with 32-bit connectors. If you have a server board then that's a different story.

 

 

Thanks for the clarification, that is what I was afraid of. Passing the duchie on it.

[red930]

For Clarity

 

When a drive is part of an array, the RAID controller has primary responsibility for the drive.

 

This means that the SMART data is not passed through the controller.

 

But, here's a trick.

 

If you have access to any another rig, you can put a drive from an array in and monitor the SMART values.

 

For instance, I've got a backup array of two Hitachi 80GB drives already built with the OS installed. I can put both of those drives on another board with the ports not being part of an array. The SMART data is read both in BIOS and with any SMART monitoring tool like EVEREST.

 

This gives you a chance to see if any errors are building so you can take preemptive action.

 

It won't help you monitor temps in a running rig but that's really the least of your worries if a drive has other errors.

[ahancock72]

Here are my benchmarks for 3 x 120 GB 7200 RPM WD drives. Model WD 1200JS. Read caching gave better read results in atto, but dismal results everywhere else. Current settings are NCQ on all drives, read caching off. I found this to give the best results overall with the 3 programs I used (ATTO, HDTach and HD Tune). SiSoftSandra showed little difference and insisted on a 135 mb/s speed.

 

Drives were $47 ea (free shipping) from buy.com with the google checkout $20 discount.

 

My dual core machine finally feels very fast

[AsAs1n8eR]

Man you should put some better quality pictures cause you can barely see the results.There are some senior members in here so you should pay attention to that.

[red930]

Here are my benchmarks for 3 x 120 GB 7200 RPM WD drives. Model WD 1200JS. Read caching gave better read results in atto, but dismal results everywhere else. Current settings are NCQ on all drives, read caching off. I found this to give the best results overall with the 3 programs I used (ATTO, HDTach and HD Tune). SiSoftSandra showed little difference and insisted on a 135 mb/s speed.

 

Drives were $47 ea (free shipping) from buy.com with the google checkout $20 discount.

 

My dual core machine finally feels very fast

what stripe did you use?

[ahancock72]

Man you should put some better quality pictures cause you can barely see the results.There are some senior members in here so you should pay attention to that.

 

I'm sorry. I saved it as a .gif file because that yielded an acceptable file size from paint. I will post larger, more readable images tonight.

 

what stripe did you use?

 

Default 64K stripe and 4K cluster size on my partitions.

[catkicker]

MySeagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. Lookingg forward to doing some benchtest with it. Depending on the results I may pick up a second one to replace the old seagate satas raid array.

[red930]

Perpendicular Recordings do well on benchie

[red930]

Here are my benchmarks for 3 x 120 GB 7200 RPM WD drives. Model WD 1200JS. Read caching gave better read results in atto, but dismal results everywhere else. Current settings are NCQ on all drives, read caching off. I found this to give the best results overall with the 3 programs I used (ATTO, HDTach and HD Tune). SiSoftSandra showed little difference and insisted on a 135 mb/s speed.

 

Drives were $47 ea (free shipping) from buy.com with the google checkout $20 discount.

 

My dual core machine finally feels very fast

them the

Perpendicular Recording 120s?

[ahancock72]

them the

Perpendicular Recording 120s?

 

No, these are regular Western Digital Cavier drives. 8 MB cache, SATA 2 support.

 

I couldn't be happier, I've found that my benchmark scores (excepting random access time, of course) tend to be faster the 2 x WD Raptor drives. For $141 shipped I get a higher level of performance (150 MB/s Avg sustained), but much more space with a 360 GB stripe. It helps the bottlenecks that concerned me the most, which was Boot and program load times (particularly games).

 

Don't get me wrong, I think raptors are great drives. Particularly if you have something sensitive to access time such as a database. But when it comes to loading large files into memory (Which is games and booting), I think it mainly comes down to sustained throughput, and the value quotient starts to lean more having lots of cheaper drives.

 

That being said if I had the money I would gladly have gotten raptors instead