Accelerate Your Hard Drive By Short Stroking

I/O Benchmark Results: Hitachi Ultrastar 15K450, 450 GB SAS

Let’s first look at the performance of the fast 15,000 RPM enterprise HDD. We benchmarked it at 450 GB, 44 GB and 20 GB capacity to analyze the benefits of short stroking.

Constraining the mechanical operating range of the hard drive by limiting the capacity has an impressive impact: database, fileserver, and workstation I/O performance effectively doubles at high command queue depths. Running individual commands, the performance benefit still is 65%. This is much more than any new hard drive generation could ever introduce. In the case of the Webserver benchmark, performance can increase by more than 100%.