Introduction to hard drive technology

Awsome pictures in this round up :D

I like the idea of raid but due to limited funds have never indulged. I do however have some anciant scsi hardware (ISA controller card and 1gb HD) which is fun to get out :D

Originally Posted by Mother-Gooser
Hmmm very interesting news bite BUT it would have been useful to see which makes/model have good firmware/overall performance because as it states, they all look the same on paper.

Also, can NCQ actually be turned off?

Its particularly tough to actually do a quantitative benchmark for dekstop performance - as you will have read in the article. The only way to do this effectively is to devise a completely custom benchmarking suite, which ain't easy.

in Windows, you can turn NCQ off in the device properties of your disk controller.

Originally Posted by David_Fitzy
When Hybrid Drives are the norm how will RAID setups use them (or won't they)

RAID setups are predominantly designed for server use, wheras a hybrid drive is designed primarily for mobile and desktop use. For servers, its tends to be a case of more disks = more performance.

Originally Posted by rupbert
Just I'm building three new high-end systems soon and don't know whether to Raid 0 some Raptors...

If you cant wait for the RAID article, the short answer is don't bother ;)


BlueMax: The aim of the article was to clear up some myths surrounding hard drive performance, as opposed to explaining the basic underlying technology. I think the opening page does a pretty good job of explaining its intentions.
Some parts of the article do get a little heavy, but I've tried to be as straightforward as possible in the explanations behind it.

Good article, I like it tbh, it gives plenty of info without being too sciency, which some people don't want. Clears up some of the crap that's always floating around in the forums too.

Nice to hear a RAID article on the way too, can I suggest it be placed in a sticky in the Hardware forum? :D

is it worthwhile using I-Ram for your primary HDD though

i mean that's still going to blow Flash memory out of the water for a long time, and the biggest limiting factor is the interface, so a 600MB/s interface would definitely be useful for I-Ram

ofc its only really worth it when we can get about 16gb of storage or something, that's plenty enough for windows and your programs, just not games, photo shop and media (and other big stuff)

Very nice article though, and its nice to know all this stuff, although i too wonder, can you turn of NCQ ? :?

Note:
If you go to
Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager ->
Right click your interface (IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers)
Primary / Secondary Channel
Uncheck "Enable Command Queuing"
However, I'm not sure if this is right to get rid of NCQ, could BT confirm ?

Originally Posted by Tulatin
IDE's heading off into the world; with more and more "enthusiast" setups throwing it to the dogs, you'd have to have a sod's brain to bother buying drives on it new.

I've bought a 250gb Seagate 7200.10 IDE drive just last week and transfer rates top out at 75mb/s, while my 74GB SATA Raptor peaks at 68mb/s on a 865G motherboard.

It is a misconception to think you're getting a faster drive just because it's SATA.

The article was a good read, I particularly liked the server/desktop explanations of usage. ;)

Originally Posted by randosome
Very nice article though, and its nice to know all this stuff, although i too wonder, can you turn of NCQ ? :?

Note:
If you go to
Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager ->
Right click your interface (IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers)
Primary / Secondary Channel
Uncheck "Enable Command Queuing"
However, I'm not sure if this is right to get rid of NCQ, could BT confirm ?

Yup, that's how to disable Native Command Queueing. :)

Originally Posted by Mister_Tad
Its particularly tough to actually do a quantitative benchmark for dekstop performance - as you will have read in the article. The only way to do this effectively is to devise a completely custom benchmarking suite, which ain't easy.

Dated review Something similar may be considered possible, and coming from BT, would be updated and more comprehensive--not to mention, more relevant.

Originally Posted by Mister_Tad

RAID setups are predominantly designed for server use, wheras a hybrid drive is designed primarily for mobile and desktop use. For servers, its tends to be a case of more disks = more performance.

Nice sig. Our RAID controller manufacturer points to that older review to indicate the performance differences between 128M, 512M and 1024M for the onboard cache. From Areca FAQ

Wouldn't a hybrid drive still be faster than a strictly mechanical PATA/SATA drive?

And as for the iRAMs, the real limiting factor was the number of PCI slots to plug it into for power. Gigabyte had made prototypes of a hard drive slot form factor, but that still hasn't seen the light of day.

Consider this

And lastly, after speaking with a WD engineer who worked on the Raptors, he said that the first 20G of a hard drive were the fastest, so if you could split the drive up with that part in an array, and skip the rest (or maybe just use it for low usage storage), then quite possibly it'd be another speed benefit.

Food for thought...

My $.02

using only the first handful of tracks of a drive is called short stroking, the same principle applies to any hard drive. The outside tracks on a drive give the highest sustained transfer rates, and limiting the actuator to only these parts of the drive speeds up random accesses.

No idea how a RAID controller would handle hybrid drives. Technically speaking, an array of hybrid drives would outrun an array of strictly mechanical drives, provided that the controller knew what to do with the flash memory (I'm not aware of any current controllers that do, perhaps it could be implemented with a firmware update)

I always consider Hard drives as a performance factor apart from the graphic card and cpu. A fast hard disk can boost the overall system performance :)

I saw nothing wrong with the article and for the most part it just confirmed what I've suspected and read in bits and pieces from various places: RAID, NCQ, and most of the other server stuff isn't really a help for single user machines.

I've been waiting years for something like flash drives to become affordable (ever since I learned how to make a RAM drive in DOS - those were real useful for a speed boost).

You didn't mention anything about memory paging. I find that 90% of the time that I'm waiting for my PC to do something it is simply retreiving data what should be in the RAM from the disk.

Some questions I'd like answered are how does Windows decide what to page? How does the HD cache take the pagefile into consideration? Why doesn't the OS use 90% of your RAM before loading data onto your disk?

My work PC is tremendously faster than my home PC when it comes to simple things like going from one tab to the next in Firefox. I think this is down to the 3GB of memory in the former and the 1GB in the latter. I think you'll find that your hard drive is mainly used for "memory" rather than media files and this is why flash based hard drives and other new technologies such as MRAM will be so important to PC users.

Originally Posted by DeX
You didn't mention anything about memory paging. I find that 90% of the time that I'm waiting for my PC to do something it is simply retreiving data what should be in the RAM from the disk.

Some questions I'd like answered are how does Windows decide what to page? How does the HD cache take the pagefile into consideration? Why doesn't the OS use 90% of your RAM before loading data onto your disk?

My work PC is tremendously faster than my home PC when it comes to simple things like going from one tab to the next in Firefox. I think this is down to the 3GB of memory in the former and the 1GB in the latter. I think you'll find that your hard drive is mainly used for "memory" rather than media files and this is why flash based hard drives and other new technologies such as MRAM will be so important to PC users.

I would think that's a question for the Windows and OS Software section. If not there, you can check here and then do a search on other DriverGuru posts. DriverGuru gives some very in-depth explanations about OS paging and the inner workings with Windows (and sometimes the differences between versions, from 98, 2K, XP and beyond).

If either of your computers seems to be slow, then adding more RAM is probably the way to go. A faster hard drive or storage subsystem won't give as much performance benefit, FWIW.

I suppose the SSD drives and the hybrid drives may give faster performance, although I'm looking for faster load times in games. It's great to have a box that loads fast enough that the Windows boot screen progress bar will show 3 squares, at most, but that isn't quite the benefit I'm reaching for. :D

YMMV

know i need to find out if NCQ is enabled/disabled and then proceed to disable if neccasery, but that will have to wait till later - any suggestions welcomed

edit - should add this is for ubuntu linux

edit 2 - hmm is tagged queuing the same as NCQ? i went to to system > device manager > ide ata/atapi controllers and in the primary and secondary IDE channel and couldnt find under any tabs anything to do with ncq but under system > device manager > disk drives > hitachi longish code SCSI Disk Device - and under the tab SCSI Properties i found disable tagged queuing (unchecked) note this is all under xp

Originally Posted by GameTraveler
And as for the iRAMs, the real limiting factor was the number of PCI slots to plug it into for power. Gigabyte had made prototypes of a hard drive slot form factor, but that still hasn't seen the light of day.

that and the fact that buying DDR memory to use as a HDD is pretty dang expensive
Plus it maxed out the SATA interface it was plugged into - easily

Its a bit of a pain that PSU's don't have standby power connectors for stuff like iram

Originally Posted by Mister_Tad

If you cant wait for the RAID article, the short answer is don't bother ;)

The tests have already occured?

Originally Posted by rupbert


The tests have already occured?

maybe, maybe not, but that was just the opinion of a particularly experienced server monkey, tad knows his raid

Originally Posted by dire_wolf
tad knows his raid

I've now imagined Josh pictured in SWAT gear, or the Army General from Full Metal Jacket, with that as an underlying quote.

"Don't fear citizens! TAD KNOWS HIS RAID!"

:)

It wasn't meant to sound so cheesy lol, but now when i look at that post . . .

Most definately sig worthy though that bindi :D

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
I've now imagined Josh pictured in SWAT gear, or the Army General from Full Metal Jacket, with that as an underlying quote.

"Don't fear citizens! TAD KNOWS HIS RAID!"

:)

Would be nice if you guys could do something along these lines with things like monitors and digital cameras, these two products especially are spun by marketers saying that a higher megapixel or lower response time means that it's a better camera/monitor than ones with lower/higher numbers when thats not necessarily true.

MY ideal setup would be:
V. high capacity UPS
6gb IRAM (windoze xp)
6gb IRAM (ubuntu/Kbuntu)
4GB IRAM (windoze swap)
150GB raptor (windows programs)
150GB raptor (windows programs)
media is stored on my storage server (>1Tb mirrored raid array)

heh we can all dream ;)

the above +4gb ram
+ another PC to run bittorent on 24/7
Ofcourse, an IPCop firewall, a gigabit managed network switch, and more like 2tb, if not more (maybe like 2 x 2tb terrastations backing up to each other)
and only 1x 150 raptor, i dont have 150gb of programs

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
I've now imagined Josh pictured in SWAT gear, or the Army General from Full Metal Jacket, with that as an underlying quote.

"Don't fear citizens! TAD KNOWS HIS RAID!"

revenge of the nerd 5 i think :)

www.storagereview.com when ever I want to know anything about any HDD, they had a good raid write up and basically Raid 0 is not worth it money better spent elsewhere, mirror your drives if your a safety freak though

Originally Posted by metarinka
www.storagereview.com when ever I want to know anything about any HDD, they had a good raid write up and basically Raid 0 is not worth it money better spent elsewhere, mirror your drives if your a safety freak though

Agreed as a good source of information, but it's not the only source of information. Using RAID is still a subjective point of contention, and everyone is entitled to what they believe is the correct approach.

IMNSHO, I'm looking at a total system view where everything that I could possible optimize is brought to the highest possible (read: 'the most I can afford at that time') level. My thoroughness avoids using any on-board components whenever possible, and each specific task is off-loaded to something that is truly hardware based rather than a software based design (read: Promise storage controllers and Broadcom network devices).

FWIW, RAID0 helps me get into my machine quickly (nearly as fast as the iRAMs), loads RTS games faster than nearly every other gamer's computer at each LAN I've visited, loads maps faster than most other FPS game boxes, and the add-on Areca controller has let me avoid the driver/firmware issues of the on-board controller that I've seen other fellow gamers endure. RAID, of any type, is not just the drives, but also the controller they are connected to.

In almost every case, it depends. Usually, what RAID is and what it does for you depends on what type you choose and how you implement and manage it.

--from StorageReview