people with WD SE drives - scores, access times, noise

[Albigger]

I purchased 2 WD SE 8mb cache drives and am running them in RAID 0.

to anyone who has wd se drives (especially in RAID configurations) i was just wondering some things:

1. scores from HDTach v 2.61 or ATTO disk benchmark utility?

2. what do you think of the noise?

3. Did you see any real life (non-benchmark) performance increase, and what did you switch from?


I'm asking because everyone was (an still is) raving about these drives. they are each 80 gig in RAID 0. My experience:

1. access time: 13.3 ms
cpu util. 14.4%
Read burst: off the chart (> 80mb/s)
Read max: 63.7mb/s
Read min: 1.7 mb/s
Avg. Read: 47.7 mb/s

2. I've seen people say these are very quiet, however mine are pretty loud especially when booting up. definately louder than my two IBM 60 gxp's though.

3. I haven't noticed an increase in performance, and for some reason it takes longer to boot up winxp no. it used to only flash the blue status bar once across the screen, now it goes for like 45 seconds

configuration:
One 150GB RAID 0 array, partitions as follows:
I: / 7.3 GB NTFS
J: / 7.3 GB NTFS
K: / 750 mb NTFS
L: / 19.5 GB FAT32
M: / 19.5 GB FAT32
N: / 29.2 GB FAT32
O: / 29.2 GB FAT32

So, I was just wondering what others thought and how the scores were. is there anything I can do to improve also? thanks

 

[Ottoman]

1.)

2.) can't hear the drives over the watercooling/fans unless i really listen for it..
3.) my winXP loads in about 20 secs from when raid bios is done initializing... i do notice CS loads faster, from when it was on my Raid O wd200BB's.... other than that i don't have alot to compare between the 2...

 

[Ottoman]

I dunno why the pic isn't showing??? i put the tags aroud it, and have used homestead to host countless times b4

 

[64026402]

I have the 120 gig version. It runs about 30% faster than my 5400 rpm WDs and twice as fast as my 30gig 7200 maxtors.
I use sisoft sandra to track the speed. It reads lower than other benchmarks but it's free and it's easy to use.
Sisoft: 120 gig 27 MPs (48 MBs on clibench)
WD 40 gig 5400 18MPs
Maxtor 30 gig 7200 15 MBs (In raid ran 28MBs. 50 Mbs on Clibench)

For reference the specs for the WD1200 rates 49 MBs max from the storagereview.com site.

The performance increase was noticeable with the 120 gig drive.
My new scsi 18 gig runs 37 MBs on sisoft. It's the 36Z15 IBM.
Your raid might be the problem. Check the settings and the driver.
Some raid cards are faster than others.
The specs you showed above didn't look bad.

 

[lightbulb8817]

I haven't used my WD 80gb 8mb cache much yet, but it'll be for my next computer.

I hated the noice coming out of it. My Maxtor Quiet drives are much quiter.

 

[Albigger]

I haven't used my WD 80gb 8mb cache much yet, but it'll be for my next computer.

I hated the noice coming out of it. My Maxtor Quiet drives are much quiter.

Yeah i don't know about maxtor's (haven't had one in about a year and a half) but I just hate the noise from my 2 wd. much much louder than the ibm's i had.

 

[Glorious100]

My WD of 120GB makes also a lot of noise. Even when there is nothing read/writen to.
Performance is better than my 40gig maxtor.

 

[Albigger]

is diskspeed32 a good test for harddrives? because it after 4 minutes of my raid array it had an average transfer of 61.5 mb/s which is really good, but that's way higher than hdtach gives...

and atto, playing with the parameters i can get that benchmark to pretty much do whatever....

 

[UnseenMenace]

I have the 120's in RAID on a Promise FastTrak 100 TX2 card (SuSE 8.0 Linux box) and consider the drives to be fairly quiet, at least on par with my Maxtor drives.
Performance I would describe as great although I can not state that it is vastly better than anything else although I personally have no complaints..

What Raid are you running ?.. its worth remembering that cheaper RAID cards and onboard RAID usually use the CPU for their RAID calculations, so the card and the CPU communicate between each other over the PCI bus and as such, software RAID card performance greatly depends on the PCI bus speed rather than its bandwidth.

Out of curiousity have you run the drives without raid ?

 

[Albigger]

Actually, no I have not run the drives separately. I may do that if i get my two IBM's to run in RAID 0 again. then use one of my 80 gig se drives for backup and the other for another computer.

i use the onboard hpt 372 contoller on iwill xp333-r mobo. currently a duron cpu as i wait to get an xp chip again (fried the last one)

anyhow, are the pci contollers significantly better in any way?

and just out of curiosity does linux offer any significant improvement (hd terms) over windows?

 

[Ottoman]

i hear the NT kernals sux nuts in comparison, it doesn't not utilize the Raid nearly as well as the older 9x and Alternative OS's like linux/unix

 

[UnseenMenace]

i use the onboard hpt 372 contoller on iwill xp333-r mobo. currently a duron cpu as i wait to get an xp chip again (fried the last one)

anyhow, are the pci contollers significantly better in any way?

and just out of curiosity does linux offer any significant improvement (hd terms) over windows?

The PCI RAID cards in real terms are not much better in RAID and contary to most peoples beliefs you will often get a card to processor bottleneck which you will not not get around by buying a more expensive hardware RAID card that has an on-card chip that does the RAID calculations. RAID cards generally show their performance in situations such as RAID 5 which is what I will do once finances allow. My card runs on a 66 mhz BUS which is the reason I brought it as previously stated it is often the PCI speed which holds everything back rather than actual bandwidth.

RAID 0 only boosts performance significantly when accessing large files. While it is true that RAID 0 can vastly improve performance in certain situations, However it is not all positive as the data is spread across two drives and as such the failure of one drive will cause you to loose all data on both drives. Because of this a RAID 0 array should not be used to house your important files or operating system.

Im personally not a 'fan' of onboard RAID but this is just a personal dislike after my experiences with them.. nothing factual other than 'have been burnt' and decided not to play with fire again

Linux offers lots of improvements over Windows XP not to mention that the OS is naturally better at I/O than Windows, it benifits greatly because of this (and so much more ). Windows is seriously poor at real world I/O other than doing benchmarks angled towards the OS.. Windows XP is known to have massive performance issues with IDE and SCSI raid look here for example.

there is a belief that changing the drivers to those used by Win2k works wonders for XP but ive also been told this is a myth. Perhaps its worth trying your RAID setup with another OS see if you get the performance you want.