• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Performance of SCSI RAID vs IDE RAID

Stormblade

Stormblade

Senior member
Ok. People were asking me to do this comparison since I have both IDE RAID and SCSI RAID on my system. The results from SiSandra are not what I expected. My SCSI RAID gets lower marks than the IDE RAID (I'm assuming higher is better). Also, my drives have a 3.9 ms seek time but Sandra reports like 10 ms but the IDE is only 8.

Here are the Marks

SCSI RAID

Buffered Read : 34
Seq Read : 38
Random Read : 6
Buffered Write: 15
Seq Write : 35
Random Write : 19
Avg Seek : 10 ms

IDE RAID

Buffered Read : 69
Seq Read : 53
Random Read : 7
Buffered Write: 38
Seq Write : 36
Random Write : 9
Avg Seek : 8 ms

This is so weird and I'm not sure what's going on. I'm running Windows 2000 SP1 and you can click on the link to see my full system specs.

Anyone have any ideas on what's going on and how I can fix this?
 
I've read threads at the Storagereview forum that say Sandra's HDD bench suketh.

Try Atto.

What SCSI RAID card u have? I hear Adaptec's SCSI RAID is not the best.
 
Sandra stinks, don't use it. If those numbers are even remotely right, there is definitely something seriously wrong with your SCSI array. The numbers are slower than a single X15. Buffered reads slower than sequential reads should raise a red flag that something odd is going on.
 
Yeah, sisandra rots. According to sissy sandra, my rigs memory is extrememly slow. By about half of their supposed specs.
 
I set up an IDE RAID on my Abit KT7A-RAID recently. I have 3 WD 30g ATA 100 drives. One connected to the IDE0, the other two were stripped to the on board HighPoint IDE using RAID 0 16k block. Accroding to Sisoft, the first one scored 22,xxx where the RIAD setup scored 16,xxx. Same drives, RAID lower???
 
Wow. Thanks for the tips guys. I'm very new to RAID so some of what you asked (Like stripe size) I don't remember setting at all. However, to answer some others, I'm using the ATTO ExpressPCI SCSI RAID controller. The dual channel version. On the advice of one of ya I'm right now downloading the PC VErsion 1.63 tools from ATTO and see if that helps.

Also, based on the responses I'll be deleting Sisandra from my system. But what should I used then? I use 3dMark 2000 which I'd heard was good. What other benchmark utilites would you guys recommend?
 
Sandra's good .. just not for HDD benching.

With RAID, Atto is prolly best.

Prolly the best HDD bench is HD Tach, but it too can have probs with RAID arrays.
 
I'm noticing SANDRA eats the BIG ONE for HD Benchmarking myself.

I've got 2 Ultra160 Cheetah 36gig drives that get like ~17,600 marks in SANDRA. That's LOWWWWW. So I'm not impressed with SANDRA...Not at all.
 
I ran benchmarks with ATTO's and it came out a bit better and more like I'd expect. SCSI RAID shows the better performance. Would be nice if it let me save a text version of the results or something. I'd post them but they gave me a graph and some read write scores.

Also, when I tried to run the ATTO ExpressPCI mode settings program it crashed my machine. Not pretty at all.
 
Get a screenshot 🙂 to do so: make sure the application you want a screenshot of is selected. Press ALT+PrintScreen. Paste into your favorite graphics editor, or microsoft paint. Upload to a server somewhere, or send it to me at JayP@mindless.com. Link to it here, or if you send it to me I'll link it for you. 🙂

And just for the sake of knowing, you can get an exact screenshot of your entire screen by just pressing PrintScreen, without the alt key.
 
Heh, good idea. Actually I downloaded Snag-it a while back as well as their other camtasia or something like that. Let me install it and upload them to my geocities account and link the stuff here.
 
Those results are still kinda funny. I'm going to look at your system config and see if there's anything odd there. I'll post back if I think of anything
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top