Short Stroking 3 x 320GB Seagate HDD's

Forum Storage : Hard Drives Short Stroking 3 x 320GB Seagate HDD's

I had 3 spare 320GB Seagate 7200.10 hard disks doing nothing. These are good drives however I much preferred some performance like the Raptor hard disks I already have. Using three drives in a RAID 0 improves performance, I wanted to see how three short stroked drives would perform.

I found my sweet spot and decided to short stroke the drives to 40GB which gives me a Random Access time of 9ms and a total usable space of 120GB . Compared to the drives when natively configured, I’ve cut 4.2ms off the Random Access time, very close to the Raptor drives. However in saying this I’ve lost 840GB of usable space.

[img]http://kiebfq.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p-CqnE4-dmdzjPvWyMNVdhPiZ1YUDc5i0_3nygHl84JV_U-VOkMabO7ACbmiJElnlYEygP36ngPd02YajwOgwd-fCvJyy18kJ/Short%20Stroking.JPG[img]

[url=http://kiebfq.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p-CqnE4-dmdzjPvWyMNVdhPiZ1YUDc5i0_3nygHl84JV_U-VOkMabO7ACbmiJElnlYEygP36ngPd02YajwOgwd-fCvJyy18kJ/Short%20Stroking.JPG][/url]

Reply to Box293

I don't understand... what is this short stroking and what are the benefits?

Message quoted 1 times

You partition the drive to a fraction of its capacity. Average access times to the part that you are using drop because the r/w head doesn't move across the whole drive.

Advantage is a decrease in average access time. Disadvantange is that you lose a [/b]lot[/b] of capacity and increase the amount of heat generated.

Reply to jsc

Short stroking is very interesting to compare the performance of different hard disks (eg. compare a fast 37GB with a 'slow' 1TB drive).
But there's no way you will actually increase the performance.

Reply to Mimoso

I'm not sure what you mean here, I've clearly demonstrated a performance increase.

It's noticable when I use it to load games etc. By benchmarks show that I've dropped 4.2ms off the original random access time.

Please explain why you think "there's no way you will actually increase the performance".

Reply to Box293

r_manic wrote :

I don't understand... what is this short stroking and what are the benefits?

Check out this link on the Toms Hardware site that explains short stroking.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2157.html

Reply to Box293

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