Show Us Your WEI (2)

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello ErnieN, welcome to Seven Forums!



Nice rig mate, more money than good sense eh? :roflmao:

 

[ErnieN]

Hello ErnieN, welcome to Seven Forums
Nice rig mate, more money than good sense eh? :roflmao:

I process huge (>2 GB) logic analyzer traces with this machine... so I need fast CPU, fast memory and most of all fast storage. I'm even using the CUDA on the Nvidia video adapters to help process the traces as well.

BTW... here's that RAID6's performance numbers.... yeah, that's right 1,645 MB Reads and 1,474 MB Writes. I think that should rate about an 11 on the WEI...

 

[oidicle]

Here's my W.E.I.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello ErnieN, welcome to Seven Forums
Nice rig mate, more money than good sense eh? :roflmao:

I process huge (>2 GB) logic analyzer traces with this machine... so I need fast CPU, fast memory and most of all fast storage. I'm even using the CUDA on the Nvidia video adapters to help process the traces as well.

BTW... here's that RAID6's performance numbers.... yeah, that's right 1,645 MB Reads and 1,474 MB Writes. I think that should rate about an 11 on the WEI...

Hello again, I was just giving you a hard time mate; have a look at the thread at the link below.

Show us your SSD performance

 

[ErnieN]

Interesting. I found a new benckmark tool. That's always good. But my setup is clearly in a whole different league!

I get 7.9 on my WEI disk score even with McAfee performing a full disk scan at the same time the disk performance part is running!

I work for Intel and I get my CPUs and SSD drives at about a third of retail, so it doesn't really cost THAT much...

 

[tea]

I can't to get my hands on an SSD

 

[severedsolo]

I can't to get my hands on an SSD

Thats some mighty fine figures nonetheless

 

[tea]

I can't to get my hands on an SSD

Thats some mighty fine figures nonetheless

Thanks, not bad for an almost 4 year old machine. Only thing I upgraded was the GFX Card and upped the ram to 4GB.

 

[Firestrider]

Interesting. I found a new benckmark tool. That's always good. But my setup is clearly in a whole different league!

I get 7.9 on my WEI disk score even with McAfee performing a full disk scan at the same time the disk performance part is running!

I work for Intel and I get my CPUs and SSD drives at about a third of retail, so it doesn't really cost THAT much...

Hi ErnieN I was just wondering, what is the reasoning with going with RAID6? I know an array of disks in RAID6 can continue to operate with 2 failed disks and I'm guessing you get 1120 GB / 1440 GB = 78% space efficiency, but I hear the random write performance of RAID5/6 is bad. Is there no such random write workload in your environment?

 

[ErnieN]

Hi ErnieN I was just wondering, what is the reasoning with going with RAID6? I know an array of disks in RAID6 can continue to operate with 2 failed disks and I'm guessing you get 1120 GB / 1440 GB = 78% space efficiency, but I hear the random write performance of RAID5/6 is bad. Is there no such random write workload in your environment?

RAID6 write performance isn't that bad when you add a 4 GB cache to the mix and the Intel XM-25 SSD drives have the fastest random seeks of any SSD drive out there, which pretty much compensates for RAID6. But the truth is I bought too many drives. After buying nine drives, I found that seven drives in RAID 0 was all it took to max out PCI-E x8 bandwidth (spec 1.0). So I added a couple more drives and made it RAID 6 instead. 10 drives in RAID 6 gives about the same performance level as 7 drives in RAID0, at least when you factor in a huge buffer. With 9 drives I still have a little more room before I exceed the PCI-E x8 bandwidth, so I'm actually contemplating adding another drive.

The Areca controller is really sweet. At first the $1000 price tag had me balking but now I'm glad I got it. It allows me to experiment without having to reinstall anything, i.e. I don't have to re-install windows to switch from RAID0 to RAID6 or vice versa, add or remove drives, change the stripe size, etc. Data is migrated automatically in the cards' BIOS.

 

[mbreslin]

@ErnieN: A few things, for a more comprehensive multipurpose computing benchmark you may want to try pcmark vantage. The 1231ml-4g is great, I'm looking forward to the 1880, should be out in jul-aug. LSI's 9260 is about half the price with ~250k iops, pcie 2.0 x8, ~2gb/sec sequential read/write etc. Great card as well.

Lastly, enter your system at http://www.weishare.net/!

I've now had my 980x well over 5ghz and still 7.8 cpu score. So yeah, more cores.

Interesting system configuration though, well done!

After benching myself to death with my controllers (I have a 9260 and a 9211), trying tons of tweaks and combinations, I've found the sweet spot on the 9260 to be 5 drives, so I'm now 5x 256gb crucial c300 R0. It's pretty speedy.

Edit: I'm now tuned for small block read/write but when I was just benching different setups this was a config when I was just trying for big numbers:

I don't have a usage pattern that requires anything near that big sequentials though.

 

[fastslvblkcar]

I can't to get my hands on an SSD

you should go to this site and update that video card drivers. i have the same one and was getting the 6.9 then went to this site and updated the drivers with the nvidia drivers and brought it to a 7.0. Drivers - Download NVIDIA Drivers

and here is my scores after some memory tweaking. can you believe a 7.7 on ddr2 1066 granted there is 8 gb of it

 

[noobvious]

I can't to get my hands on an SSD

You still got me beat......better graphics numbers. Good thing I'm not a gamer!

 

[tw33k]

....Intel XM-25 SSD drives have the fastest random seeks of any SSD drive out there,....

That is not correct

 

[ZaLiTH]

....Intel XM-25 SSD drives have the fastest random seeks of any SSD drive out there,....

That is not correct

Haha... Just a quick Google search for "X-25M vs X-25E" showed a thread where someone said this:

Yep. It's fast (X-25E). Makes the X-25M look like a turtle in write-intensive tasks.

:roflmao:

But more to the point, you can read up more info on the comparisons between the X-25M and X-25E here: TomsHardware. Here is a quote from the review:

X25-M/X25-E: Why Two SSDs?

There are two different types of flash memory on the market: multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC). MLC stores multiple bits of data in each flash memory cell, making it less expensive. SLC costs much more, but allows direct access to each bit of data, which enables better performance for random access and write operations.


Let me give you an example: the X25-M, which has been Intel’s desktop flash SSD product, reaches a level of 200 MB/s in read throughput, but it only writes at up to 75 MB/s. And although it provides great I/O performance, an SLC-based flash SSD can do much better.

 

[rixto003]

just updated my WEI my box stats are below (press the My system specs button)
no photoshop or any other graphics prog used...

my pic isnt edited... but my scores are

Noticed that

I actually did some 'tweaking' and got an 8.0 today

There was a guy on VF that posted some outrageous score for vista.

Here I just found it.

Window Experience Index Scores - Page 114 - Vista Forums

Now that's funny!

Change WEI manually

its for show only and unfortunately doesnt boost performance in any ways, just makes us "sh*tbox" users a little more happier

 

[ErnieN]

....Intel XM-25 SSD drives have the fastest random seeks of any SSD drive out there,....

That is not correct

Haha... Just a quick Google search for "X-25M vs X-25E" showed a thread where someone said this:

Yep. It's fast (X-25E). Makes the X-25M look like a turtle in write-intensive tasks.

:roflmao:

But more to the point, you can read up more info on the comparisons between the X-25M and X-25E here: TomsHardware. Here is a quote from the review:

X25-M/X25-E: Why Two SSDs?

There are two different types of flash memory on the market: multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC). MLC stores multiple bits of data in each flash memory cell, making it less expensive. SLC costs much more, but allows direct access to each bit of data, which enables better performance for random access and write operations.


Let me give you an example: the X25-M, which has been Intel’s desktop flash SSD product, reaches a level of 200 MB/s in read throughput, but it only writes at up to 75 MB/s. And although it provides great I/O performance, an SLC-based flash SSD can do much better.

Ummm... this may be true of the previous generation of X-25M... before they moved it to 34 nanometer... the 34nm parts offer much better write performance (better than 2x). I don't think the X25-E is even available in 34nm yet, at least they weren't when I bought my drives. I'll ask the architect of that product today. I happen to fly with him on the Intel air shuttle to DuPont every other Friday!

Edit: Ok... this is straight from the architect: The X25-E is being end of lifed because the new X25-M based on 34 nm process has better performance than the old X25-E. I hate it when people look up 1.5+ year old articles about bleeding edge technology products and still think that it applies today! Oh, I see that I already used my rolling eyes smiley...

 

[tea]

I can't to get my hands on an SSD

you should go to this site and update that video card drivers. i have the same one and was getting the 6.9 then went to this site and updated the drivers with the nvidia drivers and brought it to a 7.0. Drivers - Download NVIDIA Drivers

Thanks! downloading now..

 

[ErnieN]

LSI's 9260 is about half the price with ~250k iops, pcie 2.0 x8, ~2gb/sec sequential read/write etc. Great card as well.

I've now had my 980x well over 5ghz and still 7.8 cpu score. So yeah, more cores.

I don't have a usage pattern that requires anything near that big sequentials though.

I have to overcome my brand prejudice before buying an LSI card. In my supercomputer days we used LSI Differential SCSI RAID adapters (massive RAIDs - more than 200 drives!) and had nothing but problems with them.

I've been able to get to 4.86 GHz with air cooling but to make it stable I had to up my CPU voltage to 1.75 volts. A little too high for me to be comfortable. 4.6 seems to be a good everyday sweet spot. The one time I tried liquid cooling the pump went bad when it was unattended and almost fried my system. I tried a NHM-EX 8 core processor once, but of course my BIOS doesn't support server processor ucodes.

I need the sequential throughput with an app I'm developing (that I call "Crunch") but it isn't all-important. It's the seek times that really make the difference. The seek times on an SSD drive are typically 300 times faster than a mechanical drive. Crunch decodes QPI streams captured from OCLA (On Chip Logic Analyzer, which is a feature on the processor die of all NHM and WSM CPUs, but fused out of retail products). I have it optimized to use sideband information to skip flits that don't have the transactions I'm looking to decode. It then skips those flits using seek operations instead of read operations, which speeds things up considerably on an SSD storage system. Crunch can decode a 16 GB QPI stream in just a few minutes on a system like mine. On a system with a single 5.9er, it typically takes six to ten hours.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello all!



There's a new tutorial here at Seven Forums some may find useful, at the link below!


How to Ready an SSD to Re-Install an Operating System