HDD Performance Question

If you want over-the-top HD performance, just throw you two Raptor 150's together in RAID 0 array and you'll have 300 GB of blazingly fast storage.

Most people would recommend something a bit less extreme.

Caveat emptor... by having 2 drives in a RAID-0 array, you double your chances of catastrophic data loss. I have a single Raptor that has served me well for 2 years now.

What programs can benchmark your hdd? I know hdtune, but what others?

I'm with you on that. I think the chances of data corruption are even more than double, especially with the on board controllers. Not to mention data recovery problems become a pain.

I would try Hdtach.

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Publ [...] est=HdTach

Sandra wasn't able to detect the motherboard specs for my GA-P35-DQ6 in the hardware tab. I think it needs an update. It was able to detect them on my old mobo.

Oh, since you quoted my comment about the additional utilities within Sandra I thought you wanted a run down of them. Just curious have you bothered to download it and check it out?

Here is a link to a thread I started back in march. It gives the the benchmark I did in Sandra and that I also found my Raptor had AAM turned on. I don't know whether it was from the factory or somehow got turned on later. It was with an old MSI Neo2 865 board. Check it out, it will give you something to compare to, and also info to ensure that AAM is not turned on. I will run a quick bench on my current machine and post it for comparison.

Raptor Owners - Important Performance Info

Edit:
It appears that my GA-P35-DQ6 does worse than the old 865, go figure. Something I guess I'll have to look into myself.
Benchmark Results
Drive Index : 62 MB/s
Random Access Time : 9 ms
Performance Test Status
System Timer : 3GHz
Use Overlapped I/O : Yes
I/O Queue Depth : 4 request(s)
Block Size : 1MB

Volume Information
Capacity : 69GB

Detailed Benchmark Results
Speed at position 0% : 65 MB/s (89%)
Speed at position 3% : 71 MB/s (97%)
Speed at position 7% : 71 MB/s (97%)
Speed at position 10% : 70 MB/s (95%)
Speed at position 13% : 70 MB/s (96%)
Speed at position 17% : 67 MB/s (92%)
Speed at position 20% : 67 MB/s (92%)
Speed at position 23% : 69 MB/s (95%)
Speed at position 27% : 71 MB/s (97%)
Speed at position 30% : 73 MB/s (100%)
Speed at position 33% : 70 MB/s (96%)
Speed at position 37% : 70 MB/s (95%)
Speed at position 40% : 66 MB/s (91%)
Speed at position 43% : 63 MB/s (86%)
Speed at position 47% : 66 MB/s (91%)
Speed at position 50% : 65 MB/s (89%)
Speed at position 53% : 62 MB/s (85%)
Speed at position 57% : 64 MB/s (87%)
Speed at position 60% : 62 MB/s (84%)
Speed at position 63% : 58 MB/s (80%)
Speed at position 67% : 62 MB/s (85%)
Speed at position 70% : 58 MB/s (80%)
Speed at position 73% : 60 MB/s (82%)
Speed at position 77% : 57 MB/s (78%)
Speed at position 80% : 53 MB/s (73%)
Speed at position 83% : 52 MB/s (71%)
Speed at position 87% : 52 MB/s (71%)
Speed at position 90% : 54 MB/s (74%)
Speed at position 93% : 51 MB/s (70%)
Speed at position 97% : 47 MB/s (64%)
Speed at position 100% : 45 MB/s (62%)
Random Access Time : 9 ms
Full Stroke Access Time : 9 ms

No AAM just slows down the drive to keep it quiet. Check the other thread you started, I think it is probably BIOS settings

let me check it

You ran the Benchmark in Sandra, click the copy button on the bottom and paste it into notepad, and compare it to the one I posted. Not that mine is especially good. I'm still looking into that.