I/O RAID Benchmark Results--Comparison with Flash SSDs
This is probably the most important page in the benchmark section of this article. Let’s look at the results of the hard drives in a single-disk configuration, as well as two- and four-drive RAID 0. We’ll also compare the performance results with the two flash SSDs by Mtron and Samsung. In this section we only listed the fastest possible short stroking configurations for the Hitachi hard drives.
Isn’t it nice to see that an array of at least two short stroked hard drives can beat one individual flash SSD in the database benchmark?
The flash SSDs do better in the fileserver benchmark, as we needed four hard drives in short stroked configuration to beat the I/O performance of a single flash SSD. Still, the cost of four mainstream hard drives on a cheap RAID controller is still significantly lower than what you’d have to fork out for one of these flash SSDs.
No further questions here: the flash SSDs simply smoke all hard drive configurations when it comes to the I/O workload of a Webserver, which consists of lots of random reads of small blocks. Although short stroking makes a significant difference, the two flash SSDs are just so much faster.
In the workstation test, four hard drives can beat a single flash SSD. Again, keep the cost in mind: four low cost Serial ATA drives are extremely affordable, and will easily beat the expensive flash SSD, probably still providing higher capacity.
You know, clicking on this article redirected me to a "Antivirus 360" popup which then said that my computer was infected. My fat ass - I have NOD32.
You guys might want to check where your ads are coming from - only matter of time until one day someone infect themselves.
i just noticed that also, running adscan and virus scan.
Not sure what you guys are experiencing. Running AVG here and no issues. But I'll report it just to make sure. Thanks for the heads-up.
It's odd that you report short-stroking as a process of acceleration. I usually employ short strokes if I'm trying to delay the satisfaction of my I/O needs.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Interesting article.
I do wish they had a similar to for the WD's and Seagates just to see what kind of boost the higher density platters will provide and maybe you won't lose as much capacity in the process.
Another thought would be for the tool to also allow you to format the one partition for performance but still allow you to use the remaining capacity as you see fit. If I want to try and keep everything in one section I could still get the benefits but if I need to, I can use the remaining room and know that I will get a performance hit.
HOWTO - take your new hard disk drive. Create a 32 Gb partition, from the first LBA block. Format it. Don't forget to enable NCQ if it isn't enabled by default. Store your test data on said partition. Create another partition with the leftover space, where you'll store, say, backups.
Would you mind repeating your tests without using the Hitachi-specific tools, but a mere partitioning tool? 'far as I know, drives access platter sectors sequentially (platter 0 sector 0, platter 1 sector 0, etc.) thus partitioning correctly should have the same effect... That's certainly what I see with my own drives.
Well the results are logical and make sense. Cant say it a new concept, but it is nice to see it on paper.
I got the same popup. The site it came from was "cleanyourpc-now.com".
It spawns a pretty convincing looking explorer window which appears to scan all your drives. It even makes what looks like a bubble pop up above the tray telling you viruses were found.
It's always been known that using less of a hard disk makes it faster but that is hardly likely to make it perform on an SSD like level. HD's are done for when it comes to high throughput work.
If want to make a HD peform better then instead of emptying it and only using 10% of the capacity which is somewhat impractical use a smart defragger that puts all the frequently used data together at the fast end of the disk. That will give you most of the performance most of the time without the disadvantage of a tiny disk size.
Not sure what you guys are experiencing. Running AVG here and no issues. But I'll report it just to make sure. Thanks for the heads-up.
This didnt show up at all on my vista 64-bit that I just tried, but did show up on an older xp machine I used when I first read this article. Bad news.
Didn't get anything here too, I using vista 32-bit but my friend using xp and got some pop up, and now he running his AVG.
I would like to see this in comparison with a RAID of SSD's. Comparing a RAID of short stroke with a RAID of SSD's, to see how they compare... This is very interesting and intriguing information.
Nice article. Didn't expect this kind of stuff from Tom's Hardware.
im using xp and no popups for me. What browser are using those who get it?
It is expectable that dual-head harddisk is coming - one for the outermost track, one for otherwise.
Or may triple head?
I didn't get the anti-virus ad pop up. Then again I'm running Linux and Firefox 3.0+
No popups on Firefox 3.0.7 / Mac OS X 10.5.6
I find it odd that they recommend the crappy onboard RAID in most motherboards...I suppose server/workstation boards have better host controllers equipped onboard.
I ran into the Antivirus 360 problem two days ago visiting Tom's home page; ran AVG and turned up nothing on my computer. IE7 + Vista 64
Back to topic. I think a large Raid array made up of 2.5" hybrid drives or SSD + 2.5" drives is better than an all SSD array. Most accessed data are on the SSD and less accessed on 2.5"