hard drives & raid - benchmark and compare!

[bob332]

DYE,

 

Look back at the start of the thread. I think there may be some benchmarks with a single Hitachi SATA II drive.

 

Since the drives are native SATA II and the controller on the nF4 is SATA II, I would think that the combination would allow higher throughput than an SATA drive.

 

the interface is not the bottleneck, but the actual hardware. hell, even a ata133/100, should in theory move data at 133MB/s/100MB/s, but it does not and sata should move it at 150MB/s, but this does not happen because the drive can't move the data fast enough, even with the raptors.

[red930]

the interface is not the bottleneck

I was just responding to your statement about the nVidia SATA II controller being on the PCI bus versus the faster bus.

 

The physical properties of hard drives will always be slower than the interface. What you want to do is optimize the drive array so it can deliver the maximum bandwidth to the controller.

 

The Hitachi's in two drive arrays are great performance for the money. The WD Raptors have the edge in access time due to the higher spindle speed.

[bob332]

I was just responding to your statement about the nVidia SATA II controller being on the PCI bus versus the faster bus.

 

The physical properties of hard drives will always be slower than the interface. What you want to do is optimize the drive array so it can deliver the maximum bandwidth to the controller.

 

The Hitachi's in two drive arrays are great performance for the money. The WD Raptors have the edge in access time due to the higher spindle speed.

 

i hear you, sometimes, especially late at night i will just rant....

[Malaniken]

Speaking of the Hitachis 80gb SATAII, anyone know what happened to them.. they've disappeared from the usual online shops. Newegg has a message saying "Item has been deactivated" on the link I had bookmarked. What gives? :confused:

[Angry_Games]

the short burst speed is where the SATA II Hitachi drives really shine when they are SATA II enabled (and Spread Spectrum Clocking enabled).

 

nearly 400MB/s bursts are pretty generous...and when you think about it, for normal use, there's very little sustained transfer (opening a webpage, MS Word, email, etc...even games....they only really hit sustained transfers on long level load times)

 

the 7200RPM spindle speeds create a bit of bottleneck, the 10k RPM Raptors make up for this only slightly (giving mainly higher access/seek speeds), and the 15k SCSI drives...well...the SCSI drives were MADE for all this high end stuff....but the price-performance ratio is terrible for normal users.

 

best bang for the buck so far is these Hitachi SATA II drives on the NV SATA II controller with 3.0Gb/s enabled and Spread Spectrum Clocking enabled

[red930]

Hitachi 80GB SATA II drives.

 

According to my contact at the egg(can you trust anyone in retail these days), the next shipment is on the way and due to arrive this week. This contact has been right about about stock arrivals 60% of the time but we all know how schedules can change.

[bob332]

the short burst speed is where the SATA II Hitachi drives really shine when they are SATA II enabled (and Spread Spectrum Clocking enabled).

 

nearly 400MB/s bursts are pretty generous...and when you think about it, for normal use, there's very little sustained transfer (opening a webpage, MS Word, email, etc...even games....they only really hit sustained transfers on long level load times)

 

the 7200RPM spindle speeds create a bit of bottleneck, the 10k RPM Raptors make up for this only slightly (giving mainly higher access/seek speeds), and the 15k SCSI drives...well...the SCSI drives were MADE for all this high end stuff....but the price-performance ratio is terrible for normal users.

 

best bang for the buck so far is these Hitachi SATA II drives on the NV SATA II controller with 3.0Gb/s enabled and Spread Spectrum Clocking enabled

 

being new to sataII and use scsi, do they really come anywhere near that in burst? and what is the sustained speed? i know the price performance is not good for the average user, but since i have gone scsi, even with just a 10krpm drive, i cannot see going back to a 7200 for a system drive. you can pick up a generation older 18-36GB u160/u320 15krpm 8mb scsi drives for a decent price and get a huge decrease in seek times, which i can honestly feel, not the placebo effect. since i may need to get a couple drives and since these sataII drives are as cheap as pata, i may pick up a couple. my m/b has only a sataI raid, i am assuming that the sataII is backward compatible? do these new hitachi drives have the same problems as those ibm/hitachi deathstars from a few years ago or are they pretty good?

[red930]

DEATHSTAR

 

That's a scary word isn't it?!

 

The Hitachi SATA II drives come set to SATA mode. If you have the SATA II controller you use their FTool to set the mode.

 

I have hammered my pair un-mercifully the past month. I only use an array for the OS and anything I can afford to lose. I don't trust any drive since I've seen every manufacturer have a bad run on every type they make.

 

Sustained 100MB throughput is pretty good for a pair of $65.00USD drives. The array is about 153GB when partitioned and formatted. The burst is about 250 to 320MB/sec depending on the CPU and FSB.

 

From the end of POST to a useable OS is about 16 seconds on my nF4 rig. Office apps open in a flash. Games are next on my realworld benchmarks.

[Angry_Games]

being new to sataII and use scsi, do they really come anywhere near that in burst? and what is the sustained speed? i know the price performance is not good for the average user, but since i have gone scsi, even with just a 10krpm drive, i cannot see going back to a 7200 for a system drive. you can pick up a generation older 18-36GB u160/u320 15krpm 8mb scsi drives for a decent price and get a huge decrease in seek times, which i can honestly feel, not the placebo effect. since i may need to get a couple drives and since these sataII drives are as cheap as pata, i may pick up a couple. my m/b has only a sataI raid, i am assuming that the sataII is backward compatible? do these new hitachi drives have the same problems as those ibm/hitachi deathstars from a few years ago or are they pretty good?

avg throughput on 2x drives is about 97-100MB/s, with bursts up around 300-350MB/s

 

as for the scsi...its just not good bang for the buck compared to these SATA II drives...

 

3x Hitachi 80GB 8mb 7200RPM SATA II @ $59/ea...and here's just a first-run bench of them:

 

 

 

my board has SATA II already on it, so no need for expensive SATA II card, and the drives, again, were $59 each so they don't cost a lot...and then there's the noise...a 7200RPM drive is very quiet, even with all 3 grinding away.

 

then look at SCSI...you got an expensive U360 card, and then the drives new are pretty expensive each (and one never should purchase used drives...thats my rule, and i always stick to it), and then there's the noise of 15k rpm drives spinning away.

 

 

 

my cost? $180-ish for the drives, plus the cost of the mobo.

 

SCSI? who knows how much that stuff is all brand new, and the cost of the mobo.

 

I'd say definitely that SATA II 7200RPM 80GB 8mb cache Hitachi drives are WELL worth the money for everyday users like us.

 

if you need scsi drives, then you probably are not using a regular enthusiast board, but a server board, or have some great need like real-time editing and you'd really want a Pentium4 rig for that with Hyperthreading.

[THunDA]

Looks a lot better THunDA, but still not as good as mine or cpuz's: http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showpost.p...2&postcount=120. I'm sort of surprised by the divergence. But your HD Tach shot shows a date of 2005-03-04 at 21:54, so I'm sort of confused by that part.

 

Yea.. I dunno why either.. Honestly im just happy they arent clicking..lol.. And also that the readswrites are close and not 10k..hehe..

 

The date is prolly cuz I cleared cmos and forgot to reset my datetime..

[vega27]

Games are next on my realworld benchmarks.

 

cool, i'm gonna hold ya to it! anxious to see them, as this is my PC's primary function and i've always heard RAID never really benefits gamers except level loading times. thanks, exroadie!

[red930]

cool, i'm gonna hold ya to it! anxious to see them, as this is my PC's primary function and i've always heard RAID never really benefits gamers except level loading times. thanks, exroadie!

Well, besides game loading and level load times, there isn't much use for a hard drive during game play.

 

As interfaces, hard drives and arrays have become faster, the size of games has grown larger.

 

Most current and popular games keep their textures and models in a compressed file format. After the drive or array has read them, they have to be decompressed by the CPU.

 

A slow interface on a slow CPU will not be able to take advantage of fast drives.

 

You need to strike a nice balance between CPU and array speed.

 

On my nf3 rig, moving from a single SATA drive to a RAID-0 array lowered my game and level load times less than 8 percent. If I had spent the money on Raptors I would have been happy. Since I spent 2/3rds the cost of one Raptor on a pair of Hitachi 80GB drives, I was thrilled.