Hard Drive Benchmarks

[Zak33]

Hi guys,

Let's imagine someone you knew had two brand new SATA drives, and a fair bit of patience.

Imagine they wanted to benchark first one drive, then 2 in RAID, on brand new fresh installs of XP.

What would you suggest they used for proper real life efficiency and speed tests?

HD Tacho is one. What else?

A simple stop watch for Windows Booting? A fresh install of a favourite game and more stop watch action, maybe over 5 attempts, with averaged results?

I am considering a RAID array for these two, but 2 disks as sperate drives is equally appealing for tidyness, ease of defrag on the main drive and loads of data going on the other.

Space is cheap, so if RAID is noticeably faster it will stay and anothe rdrive could be purchased for data and backup, but simply....

how would YOU test?

[herulach]

I think a lot of storagereview.com stuff is proprietary, but you might be able to glean something from:
http://www.storagereview.com/article...estbed4_1.html

Also, the Ultimate boot cd has some benchmarking stuf iirc

[TooNice]

Depends on the task you do I suppose. For Windows Booting, you'll definitely see some improvement.

You can also test archiving (compressing large rar file), Photoshop, Video editing, . Well, there are many things you -could- test, but it depends on the importance you attach to those. In practice, I'd say that the gains can be as low as 5% and as high as almost twice the speed (minus some overhead).

[arthurleung]

I would do Sandra

I once tried to RAID 4x300G HDD (just first 40GB) and it ended up slower than single disks (if I try to copy from the array to one of the hdd). While 1.2T RAID0 looks tempting, I'm not brave enough to risk it.

I question myself do I need more than 2xHDD RAID0.

My home GbE tops at 84MB/s so 2 disks is just about right (35mb/s/hd from inner tracks)

[Agent]

I once tried to RAID 4x300G HDD (just first 40GB) and it ended up slower than single disk

let me guess, they were IDE drives, running on 2 channels ?

[arthurleung]

let me guess, they were IDE drives, running on 2 channels ?

No, nForce 4 4x300G Seagate 7200.9

the array tops at 270MB/s but random access sucks like hell.

Its just my usage is more suitable to use disk-2-disk copying rather than the whole thing raided.

[vaio]

You could try ATTO

[Agent]

No, nForce 4 4x300G Seagate 7200.9

the array tops at 270MB/s but random access sucks like hell.

Its just my usage is more suitable to use disk-2-disk copying rather than the whole thing raided.

I mean, how were they set up ?
Were they SATA or IDE ?

[cotswoldcs]

As mentioned Sandra is a good diagnostic. A Windows Bootup stopwatch test, whilst inaccurate is worth doing. Plus, time a resume from Hibernate as I generally hibernate my computer 90% of the time - it's much quicker and seems pointless to shutdown every time.