Westen Digital Caviar Black SATA 6Gbs Perfomance Question.

[TheMightyDude]

Ok I have brought 2 of the following and I am running these as RAID0 I tried as RAID1 so that I don't loose any data if a drive fails, but due to the drives was even slower than my old Hitachi 500GB 3Gbs drives I thought id try them as RAID0 as type AHCI.

These are fitted to a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R board which has 6 Crucial Ballistix 6GB (3x2GB) + 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 (1600MHz) using XMP (Profile1) giving me a total of 12GB.
I am also using an i7 920 D0 @ 2.667GHz + Turbo (2.8GHz) which all seems fine apart from the HDD speeds, which is my bottle neck in my system.

As RAID0 they perform a lot faster I mean at least up to 4 times faster when they was in RAID1.

I am still not too sure that these drives are running at their proper speeds, sure I know there are limitations with mechanical drives but if it says that they are 6Gb/s drives they should do it, if they don't they shouldn't be sold as a 6Gb/s drive.

Anyway here are my test results using ATTO and HT Tune using default settings:

*** Updated ***

*** ***
As you can see I am only getting about 1.76Gb/s come on, how can these be sold as 6Gb/s drives when they dont even get over 2Gb/s ?
Now I know why they don't say their transfer rate in their specs.

Atleast with SSD drives they state that they can reach upto X transfer rate when reading and when writting, that way you know what you could get upto, but this doesn't seem to be the case with mechanical drive.
Mindyou even the SSD don't reach the 6Gb/s the most i have seen people post over the internet was approx 550MB/s thats just over 4.6Gb/s (not bad) but these drives where also as RAID so if you half that, thats 225MB (2.3Gb/s) per SSD and these are also badged as a 6Gb SSD.

Also there is a limit of the speed of the controller interface and with this board its says in my BIOS that its max Transfer rate is 5.0Gb/s which is prob why people get a max of around 4.6Gb I guess.

So if I double that for using RAID0 I should get approx 250MB/s MAX thats about 2Gb/s.
I still think these should be badged as SATA2 3Gb/s drives.

Oh and yes I have them connected to the Marvell 6Gb sockets and I have the latest drivers installed.

Is this the best that I am going to get from these Drives on this Board?
I think I was getting better on my RAID5 system (a couple of years back) that used 6+ 500GB drives in it.
But where I wanted to cut down on the drives to let more air into my case I reduced them to 3 drives (2 6Gb drives as RAID0 and 1 normal 3Gb drive)

Any help would be nice

Thanks in advance
Paul

*** Update ***
Silly me, i should have checked WD site first /me slaps face.

Data Transfer Rate (Buffer to Host) 6.0 Gb/s
Data Transfer Rate (To/From Disk - Sustained) 126 MB/s

Still anyway to squeeze the extra MB out of it?

 

[mod1fied]

SATA3 is a 6Gigabit/s interface and these drives are compatible with that, but mechanical disks just aren't fast enough to even come close to saturating it. They barely touch the top speed of SATA2.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Sata 2 is a 1.5gbps interface, NONE of the mechanical drives max that out, none of them max out the Sata 1 interface.

Drives are sold with sustained transfer speeds(which are also deceptive but accurate, IE you'll get that sustained transfer speed but 98% of what a drive does isn't sequential at all, at which points speeds tank.

I was surprised to see some benchmarks actually show the Barracuda XT(2TB Sata 3 drive) actually faster than other drives, its also noticeably slower when connected to a Sata 2 controller, but its still only marginally faster and certainly not in all situations, and at £200, its not at all cheap, probably a better controller and better tweaked firmware that uses some new Sata 3 interface feature to speed it up as opposed to the drive internals being hugely better. Might have faster rated cache aswell.

Sata 2 was a gimmick for 99% of mechanical drives, so is Sata 3, but drives really don't advertise based on the how quick Sata 3 will make it, but they'll list it as a feature other companies don't have because thats advertising for ya.

What a boost from a mechanical drive, teh worst SSD will be MASSIVELY faster than a HDD, but obviously you lose space.

The best way to go is a cheapo SSD, IE 40gb budget Kingston/Intel drives for around £60-80, then some huge cheap 5400 "eco" drive, where you'll get around 2TB for £95-100 at the moment. Windows, most important apps and MOST important games on the SSD, everything else including most of your games on the HDD.

Its surprising, after a couple my SSD's died(3 infact and I'm 99% sure its a faulty mobo doing it, yay ) I went back to a couple older drives raided and damn if it isn't slow as hell. But the most important thing, even things like access OTHER mechanical drives is far slower. Things like processing and loading thumbnails and listing a folder contents, from another mechanical drive, takes hugely longer, not just loading apps/games off the SSD but everything you do on any drive is sped up by having Windows on a SSD.

I really can't recommend it enough, and that was after years and years of using Raid 0'd mechanical drives, its well worth it.

 

[TheMightyDude]

Thanks for the reply, I already knew most of that, it was where they are stated as being 6Gb/s drives that threw me a bit, I am now glad I brought the cheapest (£47) 6Gb/s drives now to check

As they say you learn by your mistakes.

Don't get me wrong I am still happy what performance that I am currently getting, it was where I was asuming more due to the 6Gb/s hipe, either way its faster than my last setup and i don't think that i am going to get much more speed out of these drives am I, or can I?

A quick question how much transfer speed would I loose if I connected these 2 SATA3 drives as RAID0 to a SATA2 controller ?

Because I am ATM these drives should be able transfer in total 2Gb/s as RAID0 (currently getting: 1.7Gb/s) would I still get this if run as SATA2 in RAID0 ?

Or would it best left where it is (SATA3 2 port controller) ?

As for moving over to SSD, well 2x40GB (80GB) RAID0 £120 to £160 (not bad) however 80GB wouldn't be large enough for me, I do Game Development and receive loads of emails and have loads of development software etc and that would fill that 80GB withing minuites, I could off loads the email storage to a non SSD drive along with some other stuff, but the Content itself is larger than 80GB which was why I was hoping this way was easier hence the small cheap drives.
Sure I could compress the content down to take up approx 20GB the CPU is fast enough to decompress it at runtime, just makes it a mission just to edit something (decompress, load, edit, save, recompress).

And the good sized and speedy SSD are a bit too much for what you get out of them, so I may have to wait a bit longer for more companys to make them and for them to become cheaper.

BTW how hot do these SSD get?
Say I had 16*40GB SSD (slit up into 4 RAID0 160GB arrays) fitted close together in a custom enclosure connected to a 16port SATA IO Card would the enclosure require any fans to cool these drives?
Because transfering at these speeds would generate some heat.

I know it wouldn't be worth doing this due to the cost, but in theroy?

Thanks in advance
Paul

 

[drunkenmaster]

They put out VERY little heat, very very little. No moving parts at all so basically the power usage is the only heat source, which is 2-3W per SSD, mine have never been anything but cool to the touch.

Personally I'd still look at a small SSD, or a couple in raid 0. You can still put the games and things on other drives, just having windows(linux or whatever else) on the OS and pagefile will offer a decent speed boost to everything you do.

But yup, unless you have quite silly money going for large SSD's just isn't practical right now. The guys who spend £400-600 on a slightly larger SSD, are just mad, when most of them just game and get incredibly little benefit by having the games on the SSD, though thats a bit different when you're actually working on games and constantly loading things up to check things, even then its not a massive boost to game loading times.

I think most people would easily be able to tell the difference between no ssd in the system at all, and having everything on an ssd. But people might be surprised that they probably couldn't tell between a system with an SSD with only pagefile/OS and things on it and games on another drive, and everything all on one uber SSD.

I really noticed the biggest difference today, I opened up the windows/system32 folder to look for something today, the amount of time it took to load the whole folder and every file in windows explorer was laughable, when my SSD had windows on it(and was working) that kind of thing is instant, completely instant.

 

[TheMightyDude]

They put out VERY little heat, very very little. No moving parts at all so basically the power usage is the only heat source, which is 2-3W per SSD, mine have never been anything but cool to the touch.

Personally I'd still look at a small SSD, or a couple in raid 0. You can still put the games and things on other drives, just having windows(linux or whatever else) on the OS and pagefile will offer a decent speed boost to everything you do.

But yup, unless you have quite silly money going for large SSD's just isn't practical right now. The guys who spend £400-600 on a slightly larger SSD, are just mad, when most of them just game and get incredibly little benefit by having the games on the SSD, though thats a bit different when you're actually working on games and constantly loading things up to check things, even then its not a massive boost to game loading times.

I think most people would easily be able to tell the difference between no ssd in the system at all, and having everything on an ssd. But people might be surprised that they probably couldn't tell between a system with an SSD with only pagefile/OS and things on it and games on another drive, and everything all on one uber SSD.

I really noticed the biggest difference today, I opened up the windows/system32 folder to look for something today, the amount of time it took to load the whole folder and every file in windows explorer was laughable, when my SSD had windows on it(and was working) that kind of thing is instant, completely instant.

Hmm very interesting, So if I was to put say 4 30GB SSD drives setup as RAID0 (Total 120GB) stacked 2 wide and 2 high plus a bit longer for the internal cables or PCB with PCB mounted SATA conectors etc example below, that wouldn't need a fan?

Sorry for the crappy image (Im a programmer not an artist)

Could even add a little handle on each drive and have them as AHCI (look now they are Hot Swappable )
Could add a few LED's at the front bottom right etc (Power, [D1, D2, D3, D4 Active] Red/Green)
This would connect to a customized back plate in the PC via a Quad Splitter Cable (Also custom).

 

[Broken Hope]

But people might be surprised that they probably couldn't tell between a system with an SSD with only pagefile/OS and things on it and games on another drive, and everything all on one uber SSD.

I think one of the only games to show a big difference loading from an SSD is WoW, it's a pretty huge difference loading a ton of characters in Dalaran.

 

[AbsenceJam]

SSD's don't need cooling but a controller may.

 

[Mercutio]

Hmm very interesting, So if I was to put say 4 30GB SSD drives setup as RAID0 (Total 120GB) stacked 2 wide and 2 high plus a bit longer for the internal cables or PCB with PCB mounted SATA conectors etc example below, that wouldn't need a fan?

Sorry for the crappy image (Im a programmer not an artist)

Could even add a little handle on each drive and have them as AHCI (look now they are Hot Swappable )
Could add a few LED's at the front bottom right etc (Power, [D1, D2, D3, D4 Active] Red/Green)
This would connect to a customized back plate in the PC via a Quad Splitter Cable (Also custom).

Sorry to break it to you but it's already been done (most of it at least).
Do a quick google for "5 1/4" 4x2.5" raid bay". You won't get the cheapest options from that search but will at least show the sort of bits that are out there

Edit: now if you wanted to have it external the best option would likely be a e-SATA 4 or 5 port multiplier (these can be bought as a small unit). Build a wee box with the multiplier in the back, hook it up to the 5 1/4" backplane idea above, rob an AC/DC converter from just about any external 5 1/4" drive and jobs a good-un.

Could probably even go the other way and get an external 5 1/4" box, a bit of dremel work and fit the multiplier in place of whatever interface was already in there, get the power from the existing AC/DC that came with the box and screw the 5 1/4 backplane in there.
Kinda tempted to make a few of these to sell tbh The most common port multipliers are silicon image (aka Steelvine) and the cards that can talk to them are about £8 each from the far-east.

Only issue would be trim/garbage collection on the SSD's as both the card and the mulitplier would have to be trim aware. eSata already runs at 3GB/s so it would take 4 pretty mighty SSD's to swamp that.