ShortStroking a hdd !!

[Abarbarian]

So I wanted a way to gee up me pc for little or no cost and came acress this article that seemed to offer a solution.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1433706/turn-barracuda-velociraptor

This sounded the business so I folowed the trail and ended up here.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

Now I did not have a 1.5 Tb drive and could not afford one. However my favourite supplier was offering the Samsung F3 500GB drives for cheap so I duly bought several at an average cost of £35.

Before I get into the main story here are a few shots of ATTO benchmarks for several drives.

Firstly a Seagate Baracuda .10 series 320Gb on a 754 mobo with a single core Athalon 64 3400 cpu.

A Seagate Baracuda .11 series on a AM2 mobo with a AMD 64 x2 5600 dual core.

A Samsung F3 500 GB on the same AM2 mobo with a AMD 64 x2 5600 dual core.

As you can see just by changing hdd you can get quite a speed boost. The drives are all well used with XP Pro and are filled with about 52 GB and have been cloned so essentially they have exactly the same os and system installed. This is real life testing folks.

So will shortstroking bring about any major improvements. I'm going to try and shrink me luverly quite fast F3 500 GB drives down to 100 GB and see what the result is.Thats if me maths stands the test.

Part two coming to a screen near you soon.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Yes, the inner workings of different HDD's will influence speed shown on ATTO benchmarks, nice bit of testing Mr Barbaric

I wonder what me two 150Gb velicoraptors in RAID 0 will show?

Or, for that matter, V_R's SSD drive? Although I'm fairly sure V_R has posted pix of that.

Carry on

PS: It's 'Athlon' not 'Athalon'

 

[Abarbarian]

https://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3650583-1.php

V_R's benchmarks above.

My F3 is faster than his Caviar

Interesting that me Sequential Writes are as fast as V_R's SSD

PS: It's 'Athlon' not 'Athalon'

I failed me GCE English in 1974 I think an I ain't getting any better.

I think I'll try to post some Crystal Mark figures aswell hust for completeness.

 

[V_R]

Meh its all about the sustained writes.


Funny this is mentioned as i am just trying to talk myself out of ordering another to set up a raid array.....

 

[V_R]

https://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3650583-1.php

Interesting that me Sequential Writes are as fast as V_R's SSD

This was just run, nothing special done, still got FF, Steam, Xfire etc etc running, not done any 'maintenance' to the disk for god knows how long.

 

[Abarbarian]

This was just run, nothing special done, still got FF, Steam, Xfire etc etc running, not done any 'maintenance' to the disk for god knows how long.

Yer blooming thing is getting faster

 

[Abarbarian]

Well I shortstroked the F3 down to 130GB and below are the results. They are not quite what I expected and am wondering if testing whilst the system is in its normal state ie: anti virus running and internet connected would cause differences.

Looks like ATTO is showing some gains and a few losses. Crystal however is showing losses across the board.
I'm going to cut down the F3 a tad more and see if that makes a difference.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Just for interest's sake I ran these tests, pair of 150Gb Velicoraptors in a RAID 0, Win 7 64 Bit in use almost daily since January 2010, Steam and other background apps running, no defrag:

V_R, is it worth adding a link to that Crystal test in the forum software links thread?

 

[V_R]

V_R, is it worth adding a link to that Crystal test in the forum software links thread?

Good idea, i did actually think it was there, but it's not so ill add it now.

Cheers Mr FBS.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Good stuff V_R

I just noticed you fellas had the Crystal test set to 1000Mb so I done it again. How do you get that fourth set of figures then?

 

[V_R]

go and grab v3.0.

 

[floppybootstomp]

go and grab v3.0.

Ah! Didn't notice that

 

[Abarbarian]

Well I shortened me F3 down to 93 GB which is as low as I can go due to limitations in Clonezilla. The results are once again not what I expected.

Then I defragged the drive.

Puzzled by the results I defragged again as the drive was in a pretty messed up state.

Then I tested my 1TB drive with two partitions one which has 466GB filled, my defragg program says this drive is in a dire state and can not be defragged.

Once again some suprises in the results.

I can not make up me mind if the speed boost from shortstroking me F3 is worth the loss of all that storage.
Hmm