Is an SSD still faster in this instance?

[her209]

Buy a 1.5 - 2 TB hard drive. You partition the drive to use only the outer 80 GB (which is 4-5%) of the total capacity of the drive.

 

[BushLin]

For any kind of random access, an SSD will be several times faster, however only the decent SSDs will give you faster sequential speeds. What task/test are you running in this instance?

EDIT: BTW, if you only plan on using 80GB of said drive, you might as well buy a single platter 500GB drive as it'll run at the same speed.

 

[AVAFREAK182]

a SSD*

And I believe short stroking only works well in raid.

 

[BushLin]

... I believe short stroking only works well in raid.

I don't think that's true but prepared to be proved wrong.

One big advantage of using even Intel's matrix RAID controller is you can create a RAID 0 array at the beginning of your drives, then create a RAID 1 or RAID 10 with the remaining part of the disks.

 

[rcpratt]

a SSD*

And I believe short stroking only works well in raid.

I'm no English professor, but I believe saying "an SSD" is technically allowed, since if you spoke "SSD" it would sound like "ess-ess-dee" which is a vowel sound.

"An SSD" definitely sounds better than "a SSD".

 

[BushLin]

I'm no English professor.

Are you perhaps the English Language Police?

 

[rcpratt]

Are you perhaps the English Language Police?

Hey, he started it ()

 

[Cogman]

almost definitely no. If by your measurement an SSD is faster then the HD, then changing partition sizes won't give you any benefit.

 

[Rubycon]

Short stroking is pointless. If you NEED faster IOPS vs. capacity then SSD is PERFECT!

 

[pjkenned]

Indilinx / Intel SSD will be faster, possibly not in sequential writes.

 

[MalVeauX]

Buy a 1.5 - 2 TB hard drive. You partition the drive to use only the outer 80 GB (which is 4-5%) of the total capacity of the drive.

The SSD still blows it out of the water completely. Like 1,000% faster.

Maximum sustained read/write is meaningless. When you use your computer, you do not sit there and transfer a single 10Gb file over and over where sustained rates would make a difference. When you use your computer, your drive is busy doing random accesses, reading and writing of small files (that is what your OS and Games do... lots of random reads/writes of small files). Small files are much harder for a drive to read/write because they're often not in a sequence and located in separate places on the drive, which means it's slower to get to it and reading lots of them over and over just takes forever.

The SSD is ridiculously faster than a short stroked HDD (even in RAID0) solution. And again, I'm not talking about sustained large file transfer read/writes. Those are pointless. You never will use those numbers in real life unless you only sit around and copy large multiple gigabyte files left and right over and over all day. The important point of speed of a storage unit is it's random small file access, read and write. And if you look at what a fast drive does, at the 4Kb level for random reads, they're down in the toilet, less than 1Mb per second. Much lower. Often times measured in tens of Kb. That's insanely crap when you consider that's your normal use on a computer. Yet an SSD will obtain 3Mb, 5Mb and higher on that same 4Kb random read. Sounds small still. But when you compare 12kb to 5Mb, it's an extremely vast difference. Random small file IOPS. SSD wins, every single time. By lightyears.

And that's why SSD > Short Stroked HDD's.

Very best,

 

[Rubycon]

Short stroked 15K SAS RAID -

That is ten 146GB drives striped (1460GB) with only 73GB useable space!

 

[MalVeauX]

Short stroked 15K SAS RAID -

That is ten 146GB drives striped (1460GB) with only 73GB useable space!

Heya,

Do you have a screen to display the random small file reads and the IOPS of that array?

Very best,

 

[Rubycon]

Heya,

Do you have a screen to display the random small file reads and the IOPS of that array?

Very best,

I don't have it IIRC it was around 200 iops though.

In a nutshell an 80GB SSD would beat it both in capacity and iops. The array would have faster STR, however. (pointless to majority of desktop users anyways)

 

[MalVeauX]

I don't have it IIRC it was around 200 iops though.

In a nutshell an 80GB SSD would beat it both in capacity and iops. The array would have faster STR, however. (pointless to majority of desktop users anyways)

Gotcha, thanks.

That's what I was wondering. There are a lot of hardware sites out there and short stroking is all the rage and often a counter debate to someone asking about an SSD's performance/cost ratio and all, claiming that short stroking is cheaper, higher capacity and performs on par and often better than an SSD. Which on the surface seems true, but since everyone always shows off the biggest number (in our case, sustained maximum reads of a single large file) rather than the numbers that actually reflect how well the drive will perform in a desktop/workstation with real world values.

For example, the IOPS of your SSD array was monstrous. And then you see the power of ten 15k drives short stroked grabbing a piddly 200 IOPS... that's horrifyingly low compared to the cost of those drives, the controller and power it takes to run them for that performance. Killer sustained for a benchmark of course. But rotten compared to that SSD array you linked in another thread by magnitudes of exponents (haha).

Very best,

 

[Ben90]

Alright guys, howabout this.... What if we short stroked a drive so much that it only had to read the outer track, now we continued short stroking it down to only 1 sector, put some custom firmware that made the drive not spin so the head just sat on that 1 sector. Now we raid like 500000 of those since spindle drives are so cheap anyways it wouldnt matter. I bet that would beat a SSD

 

[Rubycon]

Alright guys, howabout this.... What if we short stroked a drive so much that it only had to read the outer track, now we continued short stroking it down to only 1 sector, put some custom firmware that made the drive not spin so the head just sat on that 1 sector. Now we raid like 500000 of those since spindle drives are so cheap anyways it wouldnt matter. I bet that would beat a SSD

You would not even have to go that far due to the device's buffer. When you restrict i/o requests within the buffer you become interface (and to a lesser extent) firmware limited. Sure i/o will be extremely high but not as high as a RAM disk which any modern system today with 2GB could spare 512MB and you'd have a much larger playground.

 

[Emulex]

what if you got a big ramdisk and short stroked it? would that be faster than ssd?

 

[jvroig]

what if you got a big ramdisk and short stroked it

Short-stroke a ramdisk? You can't shortstroke a ramdisk any more than you can short-stroke your RAM or an SSD.

 

[faxon]

lmao why would you bother short stroking a ram disk? and a ram disk of any size would be faster than an SSD for sure as well. some database servers employ this tactic from what i hear in fact. they get an SSD for boot and then serve the data from the ramdisk, backing it up periodically, and of course the server has a built in UPS for obvious reasons

 

[BushLin]

Maximum sustained read/write is meaningless. When you use your computer...

For most people, I wouldn't necessarily disagree. However you don't know how everyone uses their computer and I personally need high sequential read and write to my arrays, if you need that and lots of storage then HDDs are still the way to go.

 

[Old Hippie]

what if you got a big ramdisk and short stroked it? would that be faster than ssd?

 

[Rubycon]

what if you got a big ramdisk and short stroked it? would that be faster than ssd?

This is starting to remind me of Dumb and Dumber...

Lloyd: You're it.
Harry: You're it.
Lloyd: You're it, quitsies!
Harry: Anti-quitsies, you're it, quitsies, no anti-quitsies, no startsies!
Lloyd: You can't do that!
Harry: Can too!
Lloyd: Cannot, stamp it!
Harry: Can too, double stamp it, no erasies!
Lloyd: Cannot, triple stamp, no erasies, Touch blue make it true.
Harry: No, you can't do that... you can't triple stamp a double stamp, you can't triple stamp a double stamp! Lloyd!
Lloyd: [hands over ears] LA LA LA LA LA LA!
Harry: LLOYD! LLOYD! LLOYD!

 

[jimhsu]

Well, generally if you know your application needs high STR (i.e. video editing), then you need it. If you don't, then you'll probably benefit from having high random read/write rates.