HDD Results

[amindofhisown]

Hi all,

A bit new to this so probably going to sound a bit stupid!

I have what I would call a pretty high end beast.

Q9550 oc to 3.75Ghz
4x2GB Crucial DDR31600 RAM
1xWD VR 10K 300GB
4xSG 300GB
Sapphire ATi 4870x2
Vista 64 Ultimate


Ran PT7 today for first time and got really good results, but my HDD results are crap compared with others, I'm getting results of 103.9MB/s Read where as some baselines are showing 1314.9!!!

Why is this, my HDD is fast, are these other results faked or what?

[David (PassMark)]

100MB/sec is fast.
But you can get much higher with high end solid state RAM drives, and high end RAID configurations. But most of these super high end soltions aren't practical, or just too expensive.

[amindofhisown]

Hi,

I appreciate your comment, but as fast as 1314MB/s ??? I have looked into SSD and RAID and decided that the marginal throughput over what I have is not worth the extra, but if I could get 1300MB/s plus I would. So, scores, real or fake?

[David (PassMark)]

Most of the solid state drives (SSD) based on flash are actually pretty slow, with the exception of the brand new ones, which are a bit better.

You need a drive based on dynamic RAM. See for example,
http://www.picobay.com/projects/2006/06/how-to-make-windows-xp-ram-disk-drive.html
While they are fast, they aren't generally much use as they are too small in capacity

[amindofhisown]

Hi,

I think you are missing my point. I want to know how people are getting Passmark scores of 4500+ when these are based on HDD scores of 1300+. My Passmark score would be well over 4000 if I could get my HDD results anywhere near that, so how are these people getting such high scores for HDD?

Not even the most expensive MLC SSD's are that fast!

[Windsurf48]

Hi,

I think you are missing my point. I want to know how people are getting Passmark scores of 4500+ when these are based on HDD scores of 1300+. My Passmark score would be well over 4000 if I could get my HDD results anywhere near that, so how are these people getting such high scores for HDD?

Not even the most expensive MLC SSD's are that fast!

The higher scores are based on more than two SAS or SSD drives. My RAID array has eight Hitachi 15k 36 gig SAS drives on an Adaptec 5805 SAS RAID controller.

Until recently, it was possible to put money into high-end SCSI drives with the assumption that they would remain competitive for several years before the latest drives had any significant performance advantage. However, that's changed with the arrival of the latest and fastest SSD drives like the Intel x25-E.

Eight Intel x25-Es could be expected to get better results than my aging SAS drives, but it would cost something like $6000 to find out at this time. Since it seems likely that prices and performance will be changing rapidly over the next year or two, I'd probably hold off on putting money into SSDs at this point even if I could afford them.

I haven't done any testing using SATA drives on an Adaptec SAS RAID controller, but I'd expect that there would be a performance gain over the same drives on a motherboard's southbridge or onboard RAID controller, in part because of the cache memory on the high-end SAS controllers.

If anyone wants to send me eight WD Raptors and eight Intel x25-E drives, I'll be happy to run tests comparing the three drive types.

[Sabbath]

Hi,

I think you are missing my point. I want to know how people are getting Passmark scores of 4500+ when these are based on HDD scores of 1300+. My Passmark score would be well over 4000 if I could get my HDD results anywhere near that, so how are these people getting such high scores for HDD?

Not even the most expensive MLC SSD's are that fast!

They use some of the computers RAM as harddrive and RAM is fast