hard drives & raid - benchmark and compare!

[red930]

Excellent suggestion. That's how I do my testing without losing my mind over reinstalls.

That or 16x4 or 32x8. I think a good way to test them is use a different drive with windows and test the raid array from there that way you don't have reinstall windows every time you want to try a different stripe and cluster size.

[Chris777]

 

Enabling SATA2 on the Hitachi drives was a good idea.

[Fight Game]

That or 16x4 or 32x8. I think a good way to test them is use a different drive with windows and test the raid array from there that way you don't have reinstall windows every time you want to try a different stripe and cluster size.

 

That's a good idea, but won't the results be different if the test is ran on a drive that has data on it? I would think it would since you are supposed to use a larger cluster/stripe, for larger file sizes.

[tortie]

What do you guys use to copy entire drives to another drive? Norton ghost?

[psychomage343]

These are the scores coming directly from the computer in my sig, while using other programs as to give real time scores.

[Fight Game]

ok benched the 4 drives today.

 

2 x ata133 (80gig, 8mb) maxtors + 2 x (37gig, 8mb) sata150 raptors

in Raid-0....I know, I know, I'm wasting alot of space, but I don't care, I don't need it. I only care about shaving off a few seconds of anything "loading"...lol

 

I tested stripe at 128, 64, 32, and 16, with cluster set to 1/4 of this (and a few others), and 16/4 turned out the best. This was tested with clean OS only each time. Partition was defragmented, but still have spikes in the data.? I didn't think it was bad access time, and cpu utilization - considering it is a 4 drive array. But the burst speed sucks, probably due to the slower drive(s).? It took me extra long doing these tests, because from the start, I had a bad ide cable, and was messing up 1 drive, and sometime the cd rom that was also on it. I ended up having to run 12 hours of Western digitals benchmark on all 4 drives, finding the (what was thought to be) bad drive, switching cables around,etc...One of these benchmarks tested that drive at 3.3mb with the bad cable and 45.5mb with a good one.

 

Anyone know why hd tach peaks at 200mb, while atto only peaks at 140?

Or why the burst speed is so low?

 

Angry, the ATTO link in post #1 don't work.

 

Note: HD Tach is twice what it was for the previous set-up of just the maxtors, and ATTO is about 1 1/2 times better. This is as it should be, since I doubled the number of drives.

 

the raptors are sata, not the ata that I wrote in the picture above.

[memnoch7]

3x hitachi raid0 sata

 

 

 

3x hitachi raid0 sata2 + spread spectrum clocking enabled

 

[Guest Ender]

Finally got around to hooking up my new Fujitsu 36GB MAU SCSI drive, ran a quick test with HD Tach.

How does this look?

 

[Fight Game]

Looks pretty good to me. It's just under what 2 regular (ata or sata) drives in raid-0 will do. The advantage here is with the really low cpu usage and the really low access time. I think the burst should be a little higher, but this doesn't mean much. SCSI's are nice because of these reason's, but most of the time the difference in performance is very small (depends on what you're doing), but the difference in price is large (along with having to buy a scsi card, or scsi raid card).

[Angry_Games]

ok...

 

 

7/04-2BTA BIOS

NF4 SLI-DR

3x Raptor 36GB 10,000RPM SATA drives

RAID-0, 64k stripe

C: = default windows cluster size

D: = 16k cluster

E: = 16k cluster

 

I couldn't get the 32MB HD Tach to finish...or maybe I wasn't patient (but it seemed to just quit at 50% of the last test as the hd LED stopped being active)

 

 

 

C is the default OS drive, with default cluster size. It is a minimal build meaning drivers, and all the benches needed for OC Database...nothing else. This partition is 15GB.

 

 

D is the second partition. I formatted this within windows to 16k clusters, same 64k stripe. This drive has zero on it other than damn windows hidden crap that you can't touch.

 

 

E is the last partion, another 16k cluster format from within windows, same 64k stripe. This drive has the pagefile on it, nothing else.

 

 

tomorrow, while waiting for my Hitachi SATA II's to arrive (more of em haha), I will redo Windows and the stripe to 128k, with 32k clusters (I need big'uns since I will be using it for vid/audio editing and everything under the sun...its my mega-big-big workstation monster)

 

I will also try with 8k/32k and maybe even 4k/16k just to fool around

[Trevor]

Look at this :eek:. Must be something wrong with the controller driver.

[Angry_Games]

ok, here's 128k stripe

 

 

C: drive is default windows cluster during initial format (15GB partition):

 

 

 

D: is 128k stripe, with 32k cluster formatted inside windows (32GB partition):

 

 

 

E: is 128 stripe, with 32k cluster formatted inside windows (53GB partition):

 

 

 

i forgot to mention in last post that I always install the NV IDE driver when running RAID