Optimizing Hard Drive Performance

[MattTheTech]

I have two hard drives and a CDRW drive.

I have read on some pages, that overall hard drive performance is better if the drives are on seperate channels, but other places, I have read that a HD will be slower if it is on the same channel as an optical drive.

I am just trying to figure out the configuration for best preformance. Currently I have them on the same channel. I also want to figure out which one of the drives is truely faster. Should I base that on the stats (from the manufs web site) of the drive alone ? Would HD benchmark programs really tell me ? given the similarity of the drives, or rather, would the diff be enough to change because of it ? (I was using HDTach but read that it can cause problems to IBM drives).

WD Caviar - (40gig, 7200, 2mb buff) - (WD400BB) **XP Pro drive**
IBM Deskstar 60GXP - (40gig, 7200, 2mb buff) - (IC35L040AVER07) **storage drive**
Lite-On 52x24x52 - (LTR-52246S)

The drives run at UDMA 5 on my Gigabyte 7VAX (latest drivers including Via 4-in-1s).

Any comments would be appreciated!

 

[StraightPipe]

they are probly very similar speeds, if you want to know run some benchmarks like HDTach (cost$$ if you run XP), Sisoft Sandra, IOmeter... all are free downloads.


you probly wont see much difference on drives on same channel or seperate. this used to be a problem with older pc's.

if you really wanna, move the CD rom onto a cable with your storage, that way your OS will have slightly faster access to the storage and CD rom. the only time it slows is when you try to get info from a drive to another drive on the same cable, and its real negligable.

 

[corkyg]

I have identical drives on the same controller (UDMA 5) and normally only run one of them Ther are duplicates. I do see a slower data transfer during the cloning process in real terms in that case. But that is not normal operation. It is there so I can switch from drive 1 to 2 readily - that gives me a quickly accessible 100% backup.

If I switch them to different controllers for the cloning operation, there is a data transfer benefit of about 100 MB/Min.

 

[dawks]

Yea, kinda picture when you have two drives on a single cable, they each have to share that cable. So if you have two harddrives on a single cable, and your reading from both, or moving data between the two, they have to share that single cable. If you put one on the cable with the optical drive, the only time the harddrive would have to share the bandwidth, is when the optical drive is being accessed, which isnt very often in most cases.

 

[MattTheTech]

Corky-g, thats exactly what i plan to switch to. A system where everything is on my main drive, and I just use the second for when I want to make a backup on it. I guess I won't worry about which of the two drives is faster.

I think I will go ahead and put the secondary drive with the CDRW, I don't have any problems burning, but it couldnt hurt either.

I just know that WinXP likes to communicate with the secondary drive, even when it's not doing much, so the speed diff of having them on seperate channels can't hurt either, no matter how small the difference