Short-Stroking hard drives
- Thread starter rixarena
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Throughput wise that should be faster than any SSD, but the access time will be high (sum of the access time for all drives IIRK).
Also unless you have a UEFI BIOS, then you cannot boot from a partition > 2TB, so you would need to partition your RAID array into smaller partitions.
Also unless you have a UEFI BIOS, then you cannot boot from a partition > 2TB, so you would need to partition your RAID array into smaller partitions.
i think that in raid 0 the access time will be the access time of 1 drive rather than sum, as they are being short-stroked this would be less than the standard access time as it is only use part of the drive and not all of it, which would also not limit the 2tb thing as you would only be using about 250gb of each drive giving 1tb of space, also i would be using these on a sas raid card so wouldnt be a problem of 2tb.
Regards Sam
Regards Sam
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wrong in a raid array the more drives, the more access time although I don't think it's the sum of all of the drives. Here is a pretty good article about stopping the raid0 insanity
http://tweakers.net/reviews/515
There is no physical way any hdd setup can compare to an ssd because all the hype about the ssd is the <1ms access times. It's not all about throughput although the ssd's do have that too, but if you read the article above, you'll see that the high throughput has very little real world usage.
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I've never heard of "short-stoking" so I couldn't comment on that, but using a sas raid card will not allow you to boot from partition >2TB unless the motherboard has a Uefi BIOS. The sas card would present the partition as a boot partition, and the BIOS would simply claim that no boot partition had been found. Apple Macs use Uefi BIOS FWIW, but 98% of PCs don't, yet. You can use partitions larger than 2TB as storage partitions, but not a boot partition.
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OK I think I understand what short stroking is, this article might be of help if you haven't already read it...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html
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Enterprise usage is the only time it might be worth considering - obviously for home users, the extra capacity can be used for storage, but suppose your boot partition needed to be maybe 200GB in size, and you wanted the best possible performance, you might consider splitting it over the fastest part of four 1TB drives or something. At that point, if you don't have enough media etc to store on the remainder of those TB drives, you are effectively short-stroking.
Obviously you'd just go SSD if it were that important though.
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Sort of defeats the object of doing it though. The whole point is to try and stop the heads moving out of the high performance zone at the outside of the platter. If you then go and store data on the inside of the drive the heads have to go there to get it and the access times go up/read rates go down.
Doesn't seem to be worth doing really...
I just had a play and heres a Seagate 500Gig 7200.12 without short stroking:
and here is the short stroked version:
Even at 32gig the access times aren't even halved.
If it had even got them down to 2-3ms I'd have considered it maybe more worthwhile - or maybe if you were doing something that needed a guaranteed minimum drive speed.
I just had a play and heres a Seagate 500Gig 7200.12 without short stroking:
and here is the short stroked version:
Even at 32gig the access times aren't even halved.
If it had even got them down to 2-3ms I'd have considered it maybe more worthwhile - or maybe if you were doing something that needed a guaranteed minimum drive speed.
