Post your hard drive benchmarks!

How does this look guys? First time I have ever setup raid myself.

2x 160GB Samsung Spinpoints in Raid0 with a 32KB stripe size. By no means as fast as the 7200.10's but I got the drives cheap.

untitledqy7.jpg
 
NCQ - native command queueing. It must be a generally good idea but bad for raid apparently? When listing specs of hard drives thats commonly mentions so it must server some purpose with a drive operating alone.
 
megatron said:
NCQ - native command queueing. It must be a generally good idea but bad for raid apparently? When listing specs of hard drives thats commonly mentions so it must server some purpose with a drive operating alone.
Click to expand...
In theory it's a great idea, the drive is able to reorder I/O requests from the system to try and minimise the delay caused by physical head movements. For example if the system requests data blocks A, B and then C but A & C are next to each other with B at the other side of the disk NCQ will supply A, C then B.

There isn't much to be gained in a desktop environment because the I/O queue depth never really gets long enough to allow NCQ to make decent decisions but in a server environment it's reported to be pretty good.

Now when you apply it on a RAID system things can really go to pot because for good performance the RAID controller relies on the disks to send it the data it requested, in the order it requested and preferably for both disks at the same time. So when NCQ starts trying to second guess the RAID controller things can get a tad confused and the controller has to start waiting for data blocks or re-ordering blocks and performance suffers as a result.
 
megatron said:
I havent touched ncq, but I uncheck "allow indexing" as I remember it was a tip somewhere.

Maxtor diamond max 250Gb sata II 16Mb 1 partition.


Samsung Spinpoint, 3 partitions OS, games, files 200Gb sata II 8Mb


Western digital pata wd120jb 120Gb 16Mb 1 partition
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Got a brand new seagate 7200.9:
 
I quickly ran tests on both my 80GB Samsung spinpoints this morning and the C drive was terrible. It started at around 55MB/s but soon droped to less then 5MB/s :eek: the seek times were rubbish too at 28.8ms.
The d drive was better with a more typical curve and seek times at 18.8ms

I've been contemplating a new drive for a while, and I think I've just vindicated my decision to go ahead and get a nice shiny WD 320GB AAKS drive.

I'll add the results to this post when I get back home at around 7.

1 question though. Is HD Tune ok with vista? That wouldn't happen to be throwing a spanner in the works would it?

Cheers
Dan

Edit - HD Tune results added for the two drives on my PC. Both of them are 80GB Samsing spinpoints and have served me well without complaint.

Here is the D drive where everything looks normal.

hdtuneddriveyb7.jpg


Here is the C drive and you may notice that it's not too happy :(

hdtunecdriveeg9.jpg
 
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Will do :)
It's not the end of the world if it goes though as I've been good and got everything important on the D Drive and also backed up on to DVD.

I quite looking forward to a new hard drive actually.
Shame it's not going to be here until Tuesday.
 
I've added the HD Tune results of my 80GB Samsung Spinpoints.
It's 4 posts up and worth a look just for the awesome power of my C drive<-- sarcasm.

I've got a 320GB Spinpoint arriving on Wednesday which should help speed things up, though to be honest I've not noticed it being as hideously slow as the result suggest it should be.
 
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