Benchmark Software

cavemanoc

cavemanoc

cavemanoc

Soldato
Joined
23 Mar 2005
Posts
3,860
I'm in the process of upgrading my Scsi setup and I'd like to have an accurate idea of what sort of performance the blood sweat and tears have given me. I'm usually a big fan of HDTach and have used if for some time, but I've heard that it gives spurious results with the new pci-e controller cards. Other alternatives from the FAQ include:

Sisoft Sandra

HDTach

HDTune

IOzone

Any other suggestions or votes in favour of any of those? I've got Sandra as well and quite like it so I'll probably do a full set of Sandra and HDTach, and then anything else that people think is useful ;)
 
cavemanoc said:
I'm in the process of upgrading my Scsi setup and I'd like to have an accurate idea of what sort of performance the blood sweat and tears have given me. I'm usually a big fan of HDTach and have used if for some time, but I've heard that it gives spurious results with the new pci-e controller cards. Other alternatives from the FAQ include:

Sisoft Sandra

HDTach

HDTune

IOzone

Any other suggestions or votes in favour of any of those? I've got Sandra as well and quite like it so I'll probably do a full set of Sandra and HDTach, and then anything else that people think is useful ;)
Click to expand...

you got it up and running then? if so nice one.. I missed out on the ecc 256 memory :/ I'm still awaiting my dell perc, I'm about to shoot off to malta for two weeks on friday so I'll be keeping an eye on these forums for your results!!!

Good luck mate
 
Nah - got waaaay too expensive for my tastes, but I found a place that sells pc2700 ECC unbuffered ram (Kingston!) for a reasonable price - drop me an email if you want the details. Will try it out today and let you know! Just want to get a few benchies done to convince myself it was all worth the effort!
 
Whats the full setup then caveman ?

Noise levels ??? :eek:

SPEED ! :D

any results ?

I keep getting tempted by SCSI, but everytime it comes down to cost of the controller and noise :rolleyes:
 
Just finishing the setup now - finally got the card to come to life, just trying to track down a driver :rolleyes: (***** Dell! - they don't make it easy!)

Will post results as soon as they're up!
 
Wow! It works beautifully. The new array is a Raid 0 of 2*18Gb 15k Cheatahs. Below are the HDTach results:

Like for like with the new Pci-e controller and the old Pci-x:

scsi2.jpg


The difference is huge - read speed nearly twice what it was on the old controller, I think I need to dig into the configuration a bit deeper - sure it can go faster.

This is against my old Maxtor SATA:
maxtor.jpg


Not sure why the Burst speed is so good on the Maxtor, but as you can see the average read speed on the Scsi is nearly 3x faster and the Random access is nearly a third :eek:

All in all I'm hugely impressed so far - the setup and configuration is simple (except that those B*****ds at Dell don't support drivers of XP - so now I've lost my beloved XP64 I have to bodge a couple from LSI <- who are awesome!) They aren't silent, but I don't think they're a noisy as people make out - the NB fan on my SLI-DR is the loudest point of my system.

I have, however noticed a jump in temps - the card seems to produce a lot of heat, but I'll keep eye on it!
 
And just because I can:

sandra.jpg


That's Sandra. Pci-e array at the top, pci-x array and single scsi in the middle, and Maxtor having a tab behind the bike shed :D
 
You got the Dell drivers? The LSI ones are the same but the .ini disavows Dell, so I just went for the manual selection. The Dell site only seems to offer server 2003 drivers which don't seem to work - what you got?
 
Tell me about it - I really miss my XP64 - trial came to an end and I got a charming message explaining that my machine would shut down in 1 hour :rolleyes: - didn't enjoy going back to x32 - I saw a couple of threads on 2cpu - useful place for these cards - I suspect what you've got is the LSI drivers with a hacked .ini <- I achieved the same thing by manually selecting the driver I wanted during install and ignoring the dire warnings of hardware destruction that windows flashes up :D
 
yep - that's the one - clever buggers weren't they - how have your scores compared? I'm in the middle of working out how to use IOMeter, so will post those results if I ever work it out :p
 
burst is about 270 a drive
avarage read is 161 but should show about 180
as 1 single drive is 92 read rate

hd tach dont read pci e scsi card right

try atto tools run a 32 meg test this will show burst
then run a 256 test that will show drive speed
 
Hmmm... Doesn't look very promising TBH - this is what I've got so far with Atto:

Single Cheetah:
cheetah.jpg


Raid 0 Cheetahs (2x)
raid0.jpg


And of course - tha Maxtor:
maxtoratt.jpg


The array seems about right (500/140: a bit slower than yours but I haven't done any tweaking yet) But the single drive is rubbish :confused: Not sure what's going on there - ran the test a couple of times and always the same result (mmm... it is on the old Pci-x slot so maybe that's a good thing in the Pci-e is great stakes!)

By the way - what's the coding for those clickable thumbnails?
 
should be set to neither in the tick box
but yours seem low scores try messing about with options for the card

my card is disabled the now waiting on a new board ( ASUS P5W64 WS )
is your dell a pci e card? or the pci x version
 
Cool - I'll try that

The Dell is PCI-e and is running the Raid 0 of 2xCheetahs, the single cheetah is running of an old LSI pci-x.

Would it make any difference if I tried to use both channels, and had on drive on each? Haven't quite worked out what the point is (presumably used when you've got considerably more drives than me!)
 
Hmmm... the plot thickens - with Neither ticked I get slightly worse speeds - drops down towards 130?

What size stripes were you using, and is it worth setting the drives to use that stripe size as the minimum unit size?
 
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