Tiele Declercq
December 12th 03, 08:33 PM
Hi,
did anyone ever noticed how much slower your hard drive gets when windows
get installed on it ? I was able to get hold of a few brand new Maxtor 40GB
discs and a 3ware escalade raid controller for 4 ATA100 discs.
SETUP A:
disc 1: Installed Windows XP Pro running latest updates (august 13, 2003)
disc 2,3,4 & 5 (raid): Connected on the controller in Raid 0 (Striped).
tested transfer rate results:
disc 1: write 26MB/s, read 32MB/s
raid disc: write 73MB/s, read 92MB/s
That write speed was only possible when i 'upgraded' my raid disc to a
dynamic disc. When basic it has a write speed of 57MB/s
when i noticed these results i was curious what Windows would do on such a
disc.. all fears came truth in the next setup:
SETUP B:
disc 1,2,3 & 4 (raid): Connected on the controller in Raid 0 (Striped).
disc 5: Installed Windows XP Pro running latest updates (august 13, 2003)
tested transfer rate results:
disc 5: write 27MB/s, read 33MB/s
raid disc: write 21MB/s, read 26MB/s
Changing from/to basic/dynamic disc had no effect in this case.
So suddenly i had one big but very slow striped raid disc running XP,
searched all over the net for a sollution but i couldn't find anything. I
also tried at home, i have 2 discs... one 60GB, one 80GB. Same
brand/speed/birthday ;-) Tested both discs, my data disc was writing at
23MB/s and reading at 29MB/s. The disc running XP however was writing at
9MB/s and reading at 12MB/s !!!
With both systems i tried multiple settings for DMA, other ATA cables. All
have latest drivers & updates. What was used for the testing was
'PerformanceTest'... easy to use.. fast and gave me about the same numbers
as Sisoft Sandra.
One bogus theory was that since the program that's running in windows, it
would occupy the system's hard drive... hence it shows slow speeds. But such
programs are not using ANY data from any disc to perform their tasks since
they are writing random data to a non-existing file.
Another not too shabby theory was that in setup A the disc was blanc to it
was writing in the beginning of the raid discs while in setup B about 500MB
later it was writing a but further on the raid disc. But then again, no way
that this should have such an impact on the disc. And when tested in setup A
we could select the size of the write file, tried with 4GB file and write
transfer was a stable +70MB/s.
I'm totally out of idea's and i have no idea whatsowever for this behavior,
is there anyone at all that could build up some theory ? And i HAVE played
with those DMA settings and those are NOT the problem like so many of you
would suggest.
In PerformanceTest you can get a specific read-out of the transfer and when
writing it sometimes shows an instable transfer or even downwards spikes
that drop over half the speed. I can't explain that either since those
chuncks are way to big to be cached (varies from 200MB to +800MB). Btw, NO
other programs were running. These numbers are from a clean windows install
with all updates.
Sorry for the big text but i want to get u guys up-to-date to get the best
feed-back.
Please advise,
Tiele Declercq (Belgium - VDAB Student)
..be
did anyone ever noticed how much slower your hard drive gets when windows
get installed on it ? I was able to get hold of a few brand new Maxtor 40GB
discs and a 3ware escalade raid controller for 4 ATA100 discs.
SETUP A:
disc 1: Installed Windows XP Pro running latest updates (august 13, 2003)
disc 2,3,4 & 5 (raid): Connected on the controller in Raid 0 (Striped).
tested transfer rate results:
disc 1: write 26MB/s, read 32MB/s
raid disc: write 73MB/s, read 92MB/s
That write speed was only possible when i 'upgraded' my raid disc to a
dynamic disc. When basic it has a write speed of 57MB/s
when i noticed these results i was curious what Windows would do on such a
disc.. all fears came truth in the next setup:
SETUP B:
disc 1,2,3 & 4 (raid): Connected on the controller in Raid 0 (Striped).
disc 5: Installed Windows XP Pro running latest updates (august 13, 2003)
tested transfer rate results:
disc 5: write 27MB/s, read 33MB/s
raid disc: write 21MB/s, read 26MB/s
Changing from/to basic/dynamic disc had no effect in this case.
So suddenly i had one big but very slow striped raid disc running XP,
searched all over the net for a sollution but i couldn't find anything. I
also tried at home, i have 2 discs... one 60GB, one 80GB. Same
brand/speed/birthday ;-) Tested both discs, my data disc was writing at
23MB/s and reading at 29MB/s. The disc running XP however was writing at
9MB/s and reading at 12MB/s !!!
With both systems i tried multiple settings for DMA, other ATA cables. All
have latest drivers & updates. What was used for the testing was
'PerformanceTest'... easy to use.. fast and gave me about the same numbers
as Sisoft Sandra.
One bogus theory was that since the program that's running in windows, it
would occupy the system's hard drive... hence it shows slow speeds. But such
programs are not using ANY data from any disc to perform their tasks since
they are writing random data to a non-existing file.
Another not too shabby theory was that in setup A the disc was blanc to it
was writing in the beginning of the raid discs while in setup B about 500MB
later it was writing a but further on the raid disc. But then again, no way
that this should have such an impact on the disc. And when tested in setup A
we could select the size of the write file, tried with 4GB file and write
transfer was a stable +70MB/s.
I'm totally out of idea's and i have no idea whatsowever for this behavior,
is there anyone at all that could build up some theory ? And i HAVE played
with those DMA settings and those are NOT the problem like so many of you
would suggest.
In PerformanceTest you can get a specific read-out of the transfer and when
writing it sometimes shows an instable transfer or even downwards spikes
that drop over half the speed. I can't explain that either since those
chuncks are way to big to be cached (varies from 200MB to +800MB). Btw, NO
other programs were running. These numbers are from a clean windows install
with all updates.
Sorry for the big text but i want to get u guys up-to-date to get the best
feed-back.
Please advise,
Tiele Declercq (Belgium - VDAB Student)
..be