What do you use to bechmark your hard drive?

[DragonTattooz]

My Raptors don't seem to be running as fast as I thought they would. I base this on how long it takes Windows to load. How can I test the speed of the drives?

BTW- They are running in RAID 0, not sure of the stripe size. I just went with whatever the default was when I setup the array.

 

[DragonTattooz]

I just looked. The stripe size is 64k. I'm really not sure what that means.

 

[Tyreal]

One program you can use is HDTach but remember that these benchmarks are all synthetic drives and do not directly symbolize real world performance.

I'll post more benchs for you in a sec.

 

[DragonTattooz]

One program you can use is HDTach but remember that these benchmarks are all synthetic drives and do not directly symbolize real world performance.

I'll post more benchs for you in a sec.

Thanks.

I'm using NVidia SATA ports 1&2 on my DFI mobo. They are supposed to be 3Mbps (I think) as opposed to 1.5 Mbps. Will the benchmark verify the speed of those ports?

 

[jiggamanjb]

I just downloaded that HDTach here is what I got for my single Raptor 74GB.





Wonder what that fall off is at the 44GB range?????

 

[Careface]

i dont know, but those results dont seem right.. my ordinary SATA (100mbps, not 150) barracuda gets 133.9MB/sec in burst speed, starts off at 60MB/sec and steadily drops off to 30MB/sec when its at the 160GB range.. i dunno, i guess i just assume your raptor should totally own my SATA (by a bigger margin that what you already have).. though i could just be expecting too much from it

as for the dip in the 44gb range, it happens randomly. redo the test and i bet you it wont be there (if it is repeatedly there, perhaps there is something wrong with the drive at that point? someone wanna clarify that?)

EDIT: i just reread the post, raptors in RAID? theres definately something wrong there, it should be doing way better

Careface*

 

[thegreek]

Wonder what that fall off is at the 44GB range?????

defrag the drive

 

[jiggamanjb]

defrag the drive

yea, i haven't done that yet. I just did a clean XP install and installed WoW, and that's about it. I'll do a defrag and see what happens. I still love this drive though

 

[DragonTattooz]

I'll try to upload a screenshot of my test. If this doesn't work, my results say 200 Mbps. Is that OK for 2 Raptors in RAID 0?

 

[DragonTattooz]

I suck at teh Interweb. How do I make it bigger without it becoming distorted? I have Acrobat 7 and Photoshop/Image Ready 7, but I suck at using them for anything but basic stuff.

 

[DragonTattooz]

Let's try this again. I think I just learned something...

 

[GrayT]

Are you using the 8mb zones? You should be using the 32mb zones to rule out those spikes. I noticed my speeds were a little higher with the 32mb zone.

 

[DragonTattooz]

Are you using the 8mb zones? You should be using the 32mb zones to rule out those spikes. I noticed my speeds were a little higher with the 32mb zone.

I'm using the 32Mb zones. I've run the test several times and I always get those spikes. I also tried changing to SATA ports 3&4, but it didn't really make much difference.

 

[GrayT]

I'm using the 32Mb zones. I've run the test several times and I always get those spikes. I also tried changing to SATA ports 3&4, but it didn't really make much difference.

Hmm, well how is the real world performance of this setup? If it feels fine then there should be no reason to judge peformance off of these stats.

Still, it is very weird how one drive is getting such low scores. My 80GB SATA has burst speeds at 133mbps and it's a 7200rpm drive.

Also, I wouldn't worry about judging your speeds against the comparison drives that it, by default, displays. Those conditions are absolutely perfect lab testing benchmarks and I'm guessing are only there to theoretically show what is possible out of a certain drive type.

 

[jiggamanjb]

just grabbed the new drivers for my SATA controller and everything is working great now. just a little tip for anyone else having the same issue.

 

[K15]

My 160GB Seagate 7200.9 starts at 75MB/s and drops to 40MB/s with an average of 63-65MB/s. The drop off is usually because another program accessed the drive while the test was running. Run it several times to get a good average. Your random access is amazing though, mine is 13ms, giving me a 8.8 seek

 

[JCLW]

Ignore the burst speeds - they depend more on the controller then the drive. Only worry if your burst speed is as slow as your STR (or if your STR is as fast as your burst )

The two things you want to look at are the STR, and the access time.

jiggamanjb's graph looks fine for a single Raptor, ~70MB/s falling to ~50MB/s with an ~8ms access time.

DragonTattooz's graph looks wierd to me. The STR looks a little low, the graph is too flat (indicating a bottleneck somewhere around the 106MB/s mark), and the spikes go up instead of down. Access time is OK 'tho.

It doesn't matter if your SATA ports support SATA-300, because the Raptors only support UDMA-6 (ATA-133).

DragonTattooz: Try Irfanview (free) for quick easy image rotating & resizing. Try ImageShack for image hosting.

 

[JCLW]

You can also try http://nodesoft.com/DiskBench/ (you'll need .NET)

The way I do it:
- Defrag
- Restart
- Kill things like A/V
- Load DiskBench
- Create the file "C:\bench.tst", block size 8MB and 256 blocks = 2GB, do NOT kill destination file
- Copy "C:\bench.tst" to "C:\bench2.tst", kill the destination file.
- Read "C:\bench.tst" in 32MB blocks
- Look at results, close DiskBench
- Delete C:\bench.tst