Show us your hard drive performance

ciphernemo,

I have quite a bit of experience with RAID configurations. I'm a systems engineer for a living and have been building servers and running SAN/NAS devices (EMC and NetApp) with RAID 1, 5, 10, and 50 for a number of years. In fact, in the past month I have been troubleshooting a significant RAID performance issue on a VMWare ESXi 3.5 update 4 server on a HP Proliant DL360 Gen 5 server with 15,000 RPM 2.5" SAS Drives. Turned out to be an issue with the HP Smart Array P410i RAID controller and it's BBWC (battery backed write cache module)..or in this case...it's lack thereof. Thus, VMWare would not utilize any write caching whatsoever on the drive and instead held until the data was on the platters.

At home, prior to having SSD's and simply using the onboard RAID controllers on mobos (mostly software RAID), the benchmarks always returned higher numbers and straight up large file copies indeed verified in the increased performance....but the actual time differences noticed when booting my operating system or launching a game (games I tested at the time were BattleField 2, Half Life 2, and Doom 3) came back negligible. And as you noted, I was doing this with 1 single monitor at a smallish resolution of 1280x1024. Now, with file copies...the difference was very significant. You really saw it when you copied a 20GB virtual machine file from 1 folder to another for backup purposes. So, I've always maintained that I think for most PC users and even gaming enthusiasts, that RAID0 configs of the entire OS just hasn't been a wise choice. Especially in the last few years where drive capacities (of mechanical drives) seems to have increased rapidly, but with failure rates among manufacturers going up as well.

Again, I'm not criticizing, but looking for feedback on where things stand these days. Like I said, I wanted to see numbers. If your game load times went from 5 seconds to less than 1 second...that's significant.

Also, I'm certain you are aware but with some of the newer SSD's out there, like the Intel and OCZ...the stuttering problem with the original controllers has pretty much been solved. Unfortunately, the cost of these drives is quite a bit higher...naturally.

Again, sorry if it seemed like I was criticizing your choices. But to assume that I have no real-world experience with RAID and am otherwise misinformed, is simply not the case. And like I noted, you aren't running your OS's and such on the RAID 0 and that really helps in the event of a failure. Plus, you have unique monitor layouts that provide additional necessity for what you are running.

Thanks for taking the time and sharing your performance numbers.

Intel X25-M

G.Skill

ciphernemo said:

I have OCZ Vertex drives, each with the latest 1.30 Firmware. These drives are supposed to take care of stuttering (along with the Summit and Vertex Turbo series). But I can tell you than SSD stuttering is still a problem if an OS is installed on SSDs or a RAID array of SSDs.

Well, that is truly a disappointment. I had been reading that the problems were all but gone with the new samsung controllers and what not. I think I would really want the SSD for the performance of the OS..but I certainly wouldn't want the associated stuttering. Guess it's still mechanical drives for me for the forseeable future.

pparks1 said:

Well, that is truly a disappointment. I had been reading that the problems were all but gone with the new samsung controllers and what not. I think I would really want the SSD for the performance of the OS..but I certainly wouldn't want the associated stuttering. Guess it's still mechanical drives for me for the forseeable future.

Even though they end up being a lil more pricey I stuck with Intel since they have been getting excellent reviews all over the place.

Here are my benchmarks. RAID 0 with two VelociRaptors. W7 RTM X64. Although the performance feels good, I am upset that the Windows rating only gives disk performance a 6.1. Everything else is 7.4 to 7.6. Any idea why it reports so low in the Windows Experience Index?

Am I concerned about nothing?
Charlie

charlieo said:

Here are my benchmarks. RAID 0 with two VelociRaptors. W7 RTM X64. Although the performance feels good, I am upset that the Windows rating only gives disk performance a 6.1. Everything else is 7.4 to 7.6. Any idea why it reports so low in the Windows Experience Index?

Am I concerned about nothing?
Charlie

Charlie....Yes, you are concerned about nothing. From everything that I have read and seen, SATA drives seem to top out at 5.9....even some RAID 0 arrays have topped out at 5.9. The only people who are scoring higher than this are using solid state drives. And they certainly have their pros and cons...so it's not yet a no-brainer to switch for the average joe.

Thank you pparks1. I specialize in worrying about nothing!

Do my numbers look good for a RAID 0?

Charlie

ps. It was easy to change the score anyway..... I gave myself a 7.9