Single vs multi user performance of hard drives.

[elkinm]

My main drive is currently a Samsung SpinPoint 400GB 8MB. It was cheap when I bough it, but it seems unbelievably slow.
Every time I come back to my PC after it has been sitting a while it takes forever for it to reach normal speeds, and it never really gets fast. The computer crawls with the hard drive grinding away.
A different computer with less ram and an old reliable Maxtor drive is much faster in cases like this.

Looking at reviews, the drive should not be that slow from a single user perspective, and definitely faster then my older drives.
From a multiuser perspective with a higher IO queue the SpinPoint is horrible.

So from that, I would like to get a new hard drive. Either a Hitachi 1 TB which is still the fastest user drive. Or the WD 750 GB which is nearly as fast for single user but is much faster when the queue depth increases.

Is there any good application that can actually tell me why system and hard drive is so slow. I have not seen one that is really good at tracking I/O and application performance?

Thank you
elkinm

 

[corkyg]

You are not getting much response because the question is odd. The hard drive's performance has nothing to do with the number of users. If the system is being slowed down, maybe the harddrive is set to PIO rather than the proper UDMA?

 

[yuchai]

The multiuser performance benchmarks are irrelevant for desktop usage. Even when you multi-task heavily the usage is very different than a server scenario.

That said I agree with the post above that a good starting point is checking whether it's running UDMA.

In terms of apps you can try HDTach and go from there. If you get a ridiculously high CPU usage or low transfer rates then you know something isn't configured properly.

 

[elkinm]

I only went to multiuser performance because very often I hear it grinding away for a while and not really doing much. HD Tach gives it an average speed of 60-61 Mps. The seek time is a rather slow 15.8 ms By comparison the Seagate 7200.10 320 tested with a 65-66 Mbs and much better seek time of 13.1 ms.
CPU time in both cases was never above 2 percent and DMA is enabled on all drives.

Maybe it is the slow seeks that are causing the problems, but I would think it would not make such a big impact.

As far as applications, I was looking for more of disk monitoring then benchmarking.
Something like a task manger for drives.
When the drive is grinding away I want to know what application is using up the drive time as it were cpu time. As well as what files are needed and the time needed to access them. I don't know if something like that exists as I would expect it to be mentioned all the time, but maybe something close.

Thanks again.