Benchmark Software

cavemanoc · 5 Sep 2006 at 11:13

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 · 8 Sep 2006 at 11:30

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!

cavemanoc · 8 Sep 2006 at 18:06

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!

cavemanoc · 8 Sep 2006 at 19:30

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:

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:

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!

cavemanoc · 8 Sep 2006 at 19:38

And just because I can:

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

cavemanoc · 8 Sep 2006 at 21:36

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?

cavemanoc · 8 Sep 2006 at 22:19

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

cavemanoc · 9 Sep 2006 at 10:13

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

cavemanoc · 12 Sep 2006 at 19:47

Hmmm... Doesn't look very promising TBH - this is what I've got so far with Atto:

Single Cheetah:

Raid 0 Cheetahs (2x)

And of course - tha Maxtor:

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?

cavemanoc · 13 Sep 2006 at 08:47

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!)

cavemanoc · 13 Sep 2006 at 12:15

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?

cavemanoc · 13 Sep 2006 at 14:52

dfi nf4 sli dr (old model)

cavemanoc · 15 Sep 2006 at 16:04

I might back up the drive and have a play - did you set anything special in the disk management section in windows?

cavemanoc · 23 Sep 2006 at 12:14

Cool - hopefully you got the memory with it, if not I've got a handy site, drop me an email if you need it! You'll be happy to know that the setup is incredibly simple, and I've found another forum site that is brilliant for us as it has several users of the Dell and LSi versions of the card, can be found Here

cavemanoc · 23 Sep 2006 at 18:27

Yeah - sounds like my plan thought I'm trying to pick up some Cheetahs as that's what I started on!

The problem with the non SLi (Ultra D?) is that the 2nd slot only runs at 2x speed - this will work with the card, but not at full speed :rolleyes:

You need to mod your board to SLi, then you can run the slots at 8x and 8x.

The mod can be found Here

You will have to use the LSI drivers as Dell don't support XP :rolleyes:

You can do it manually by telling the wizard you'll select the driver from a list or you can use the method below:

This thread was quite helpful, although the .rar files I downloaded were corrupt. Here is what I did to make it work for me. Go to www.lsi.com and download the Megaraid 320-2e driver. Unzip it and open the oemsetup.ini file in notepad. Find the line in the section with all the ExcludeFromSelect's that reads:
ExcludeFromSelect = PCI\VEN_1000&DEV_0408&SUBSYS_00021028
Delete that line.
Further down, look for the section titled:
;MegaRAID PCI Express(TM) ROMB
It will have two entries. Add a third line:
%mraidPCIEROMB.DeviceDesc% = mraid35x_Inst, PCI\VEN_1000&DEV_0408&SUBSYS_00021028
----------------------------
Basically what you do is tell the LSI driver NOT to ignore the Dell version of the card (by deleting the ExcludeFromSelect line) and then tell it to treat it like the MegaRAID card, by adding the line further down.
Use the modified OEMSETUP.inf file along with all the other LSI driver files and it will install successfully on an existing WinXP setup. (You will get the warning about the driver not being Windows certified, but ignore it). You can also copy the driver files to a floppy along with the modified inf file, and hit F6 during a new install, and it will work there too. Good luck!

Should just about cover it!

EDIt: I'd always recommend having a seperate windows drive as well, so perhaps an 18Gb 15k drive purely for windows as well as the array (that's what I've gone for!)

Also: On my board I only get boot every other go - bit of a pain, but I'm still working on it - the board completely hangs and the power/reset buttons don't work - I have to unplug, then try again and it always works second time! The guys on 2Cpu with Ultra-D's don't have this problem, and it may be down to your GFX card, so let me know if it happens to you