*POLL* What is the Fastest OS partition one can Create ?

[Kniteman77]

Looking to create a REALLY fast OS partition for my Dual 3.3 Ghz Xeon machine I just got. No point in having all the power if you cant take advantage of it somehow So I figure a really snappy OS drive is a good way to start.

Ok, so take the poll, post any comments you may have in the thread, and Bump to get maximum exposure for maximum results of the pollage

Is there much if any of a performance boost between 10,000 and 15,000 RPM SCSI Drives ?

Same question, only with u160 and u320 SCSI drives.

Thanks, and I look forward to people telling me how much of a Nub I am . . . but please just suggest what your experience says will be the fastest.

 

[Kniteman77]

Anyone ?

 

[bjc112]

If you are on a budget the U320 setup won't fit.

It will definitely be the fastest , but that comes at a high price.

 

[Rand]

Assuming cost is absolutely no object, and your not concerned about noise at all and your strictly limited to only two drives then you'd probably look towards a pair of Fujitsu MAU 15K RPM SCSI drives on a U320 controller.

Might want to consider active cooling for the HDD's if you don't have a well ventilated case if you go that route.

RAID 0 isn't typically a a very significant advantage for typical single user application performance though, and a pair of Fujitu AMU's will be awfully loud when seeking.

A much more cost effective, and less noisy/hot solution without a huge loss in performance would be to go with a single Western Digital WD740GD Raptor drive.
If you really want RAID 0 then a pair of Raptors, or perhaps a pair of WD "JB" series drives, or Maxtor's Maxline III would be quite nice.


The above is of course assuming your purely interested in single user desktop application performance, if this is for a file server or something of the like then my recommendations would definitely change and I'd much more strongly suggest passing on RAID 0.

 

[sharkeeper]

Our Clarrion arrays with 16GB of cache per bank are quite fast. Running XP on it? That's akin to having a personal helicopter (flown by you!) back and forth to your office.

[now that the ship has returned to Earth]

Your best bet is to boot off a quick 15k third genny or better SEA or 2nd genny FUJ MAU in R1 or R0 (single) on an independent channel with redundant IDE or multiplexed GigE SAN or 10GE if you have a lot of power hungry users.

320-2X and SRCU42X HBA's are excellent in workstations at all levels. I'm testing one with a 1GB module next week, this is due to be released in the spring. (1GB cache addressable SRCU42X)

Oh and if you're wondering, yes this stuff is expensive.

Cheers!

 

[SunSamurai]

I would go for a huge RAID50 server with 200+ 15000RPM Seagates hooked stright to my CPU though a fiber line.

Who needs RAM?

 

[Pr0d1gy]

Anandtech has done alot of tests & always says RAID is not any faster than a single drive. The whole RAID being faster myth is brought on by people who spent thousands of dollars on top end hard drives & controller cards and by the time they were done installing them decided they had to be faster.

It really depends on how much room you need on the hard drive, and what you plan on doing with your computer. If you're just gonna surf the net & play games, you could get a 36gb 15,000rpm that would kick major tail with Windows & a game or two...of course once you get 3+ games on that drive it gets really packed. You could spend about twice as much to be safe & get a 70's gb hdd @ 15k rpm. It's all dependant upon your budget & uses for the PC.

 

[sharkeeper]

Anandtech has done alot of tests & always says RAID is not any faster than a single drive. The whole RAID being faster myth is brought on by people who spent thousands of dollars on top end hard drives & controller cards and by the time they were done installing them decided they had to be faster.

No hardware sites have performed tests on intelligent I/O systems.

These are slow to initialise when starting, but they fly when running. Systems here are "blessed" (certified) by contractors and are incredibly stable anyways so there is hardly a restart. It makes me cringe just to think if I had to go back to a single IDE disk based PC again for my work.

Cheers!

 

[Matthias99]

Anandtech has done a handful of tests, once, & always says RAID 0 is not any faster than a single drive for typical single-user desktop use.

Corrected.

Various RAID setups can be a hell of a lot faster than a single drive -- but it depends on what you're doing. For MS Office, or playing games, it's not going to help. For audio/image/video editing, or a file server for a home network, it could make a noticeable difference. For a database server pushing 10K IOPS, it could be night and day.

A single-user workstation would generally see more benefit out of a single very fast (high-RPM = low seek time) SCSI drive than a RAID0 array. That's about all I can agree with. And this doesn't even get into intelligent caching controllers.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Pr0d1gy
Anandtech has done alot of tests & always says RAID is not any faster than a single drive.

I thought that the basic premise/conclusion, was that, given a group of HDs, and desktop-type workloads, configuring them in a RAID array wasn't much gain, and could in fact be a loss in performance compared to running them as independent disks.

I've idly mused whether, given a pair of suitably-powerful systems, with fast/efficient networking cards (GigE), whether it would be feasable to set up a network-mounted RAM drive as a pagefile, considering the average seek latency of a HD, compared to the latency of a decent network link. (This assumes that: 1) the secondary machine has spare RAM available to be used for a pagefile for the primary machine, and 2) that the same RAM isn't easily installable into the primary machine directly.)

 

[SunSamurai]

haha the anti-RAID trolls are funny. Raid sucks cuz anadtech did tests! DER!11

 

[jterrell]

Originally posted by: Kniteman77
Looking to create a REALLY fast OS partition for my Dual 3.3 Ghz Xeon machine I just got. No point in having all the power if you cant take advantage of it somehow So I figure a really snappy OS drive is a good way to start.

Ok, so take the poll, post any comments you may have in the thread, and Bump to get maximum exposure for maximum results of the pollage

Is there much if any of a performance boost between 10,000 and 15,000 RPM SCSI Drives ?

Same question, only with u160 and u320 SCSI drives.

Thanks, and I look forward to people telling me how much of a Nub I am . . . but please just suggest what your experience says will be the fastest.

My math is rusty but I'd say its 33% faster LOL.

 

[Kniteman77]

I know Anandtech has done SOME tests on Raid 0 that say there is little to no advantage to it.

However my real world experiences speak to the contrary, along with many friends.

How much louder do you think the SCSI would be than the SATA and what kind of performance boost ?

And how much will the NCQ SATA drives boost the performance over non NCQ drives ?

Thanks for all the imput thus far everyone!

 

[TRUMPHENT]

Does your mainboard already have SCSI built in? If so, then get a SCSI hard drive for your OS. You will need to get a terminated LVD cable.

Here is a bargain drive that apparently doesn't require an 80 to 68 pin adapter.
36GB 10K RPM

LVD Cable with terminator!

You might even think about getting a second or third drive for applicaitons and data. A SCSI array is greater than the sum of its parts.

The only downside to going SCSI is the heat/power and noise compared to IDE based drives.

Do it!

 

[Kniteman77]

Ok so basically now i'm trying to decide between . . ..

2x 74 gig Raptors

and

2x 36 gig 10k or 15k SCSI drives

Still thinking . . . . and looking at the cost.

Used 10k SCSI stuff is CHEAP on ebay . . .

 

[ribbon13]

Worlds fastest single controller array

3ware 9500-12 $700
12 SATA-IDE adapters $240
12 M-systems FFD-25-UATA-90112-F $29,000 each

hits about $350,000, but it would be warp level holy shit.

 

[SunSamurai]

Originally posted by: ribbon13
Worlds fastest single controller array

3ware 9500-12 $700
12 SATA-IDE adapters $240
12 M-systems FFD-25-UATA-90112-F $29,000 each

hits about $350,000, but it would be warp level holy shit.

omgwtfbbq. Could a single cpu even handle data comeing from that at top speed?

 

[ribbon13]

I doubt it. A quad opteron server with that array handles it just fine though.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: aeternitas
haha the anti-RAID trolls are funny. Raid sucks cuz anadtech did tests! DER!11

I think you've got that backwards. The "anti-RAID trolls" are the only ones with benchmarks to back up their position.

It's just sad that so many people say StorageReview and AnandTech are wrong about RAID, but they never offer a single shred of evidence.

RAID has many server applications, but the bottom line is that RAID doesn't speed up many things on a desktop. A RAID0 could speed up your Photoshop scratch disks. A RAID0 definitely speeds things up for video editing and things that transfer massive individual files. RAID0 most certainly will not speed up the OS partition of a desktop. If you think it will, you really need to read a little. The whole concept that enhanced throughput on your OS partition at the expense of other overhead will improve performance is ridiculous. Your OS partition is pretty much the last thing that would ever be helped by RAID.

 

[Tostada]

(double-post)

 

[ribbon13]

RAID is faster. If your OS partition isn't the bottleneck, you won't see any improvement. No need for a benchmark when logic is undeniable.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: ribbon13
RAID is faster. If your OS partition isn't the bottleneck, you won't see any improvement. No need for a benchmark when logic is undeniable.

If your OS partition isn't the bottleneck, RAID0 would be slower because it has more overhead than a single drive. If that concept is too complex for you, time to go read some RAID articles.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Tostada

Originally posted by: aeternitas
haha the anti-RAID trolls are funny. Raid sucks cuz anadtech did tests! DER!11

I think you've got that backwards. The "anti-RAID trolls" are the only ones with benchmarks to back up their position.

It's just sad that so many people say StorageReview and AnandTech are wrong about RAID, but they never offer a single shred of evidence.

RAID has many server applications, but the bottom line is that RAID doesn't speed up many things on a desktop. A RAID0 could speed up your Photoshop scratch disks. A RAID0 definitely speeds things up for video editing and things that transfer massive individual files. RAID0 most certainly will not speed up the OS partition of a desktop. If you think it will, you really need to read a little. The whole concept that enhanced throughput on your OS partition at the expense of other overhead will improve performance is ridiculous. Your OS partition is pretty much the last thing that would ever be helped by RAID.

But they have their anecdotal evidence!!!
:roll:

 

[Blain]

Actually the fastest drive out right now is a Rocket Drive. :laugh: But you will pay for this speed.

 

[ribbon13]

Sorry, I think the raid array I mention earlier would smoke that.

3ware 9500-12 $700
12 SATA-IDE adapters $240
12 M-systems FFD-25-UATA-90112-F $29,000 each


Oh and Tostada be sure to differentiate between hardware and software/driver raid. Show me one hardware PCI-X SATA RAID controller and drive set that's faster in single mode than striping.