Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 in RAID 0: Is Two Terabytes really better than One?
by Gary Key on April 19, 2007 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
iPeak Video/Audio Tests
The iPeak based Video/Audio benchmarks are designed around simulating media encoding and HTPC activities. These are basic benchmarks at this time but this section will be expanded once we start testing under Vista. Our change to a better performing dual core processor will assist us in maintaining a balance between the CPU and Storage systems during the trace file creation and benchmarking processes. These benchmarks are CPU intensive in nature but also require a balanced storage system with the ability at times to handle read and write requests simultaneously in a very efficient manner.
The AnyDVD benchmark is heavily weighted to write requests. The results show a common pattern in write intensive situations with the RAID 0 setups improving about 66% over their single drive counterparts. The 7K1000 scores particularly well in these write intensive benchmarks due to its areal density and large cache design.
The Nero Recode 2 benchmark is weighted to streaming read requests at the start of the test but is balanced by continuous write operations during the encoding process. This benchmark is one of the most demanding ones in our test suite with the disk being active the entire trace file with several 100% utilization peaks. The results show an almost 93% improvement in hard disk performance with RAID 0. We believe this is one of the few tests where RAID 0 on the desktop will make an actual difference in real-world performance.
The individual drive results surprised us as we expected the Hitachi with its 32 MB cache and high sustained transfer rates to score near the Raptors. However, it turns out after reviewing the trace file results it was obvious that the 7K1000 was hampered by its inability to process large data blocks in sequential order efficiently as it had a number of buffer overruns during the read portion of the tests. This indicates to us the drive firmware is probably tuned for non-sequential read/writes as the rest of our tests indicate. The 32 MB cache should have easily compensated for any potential large block issues in this test.
iPeak Game Installation Tests
Our iPeak based Game Installation benchmarks simply show the ability of the hard drive to write data as quickly as possible to the disc based upon the installation software instructions. As detailed in our iPeak setup description we installed the games from our source drive in order to eliminate the optical drive bottleneck. In separate application timing we witnessed basically the same percentage spread when installing the games via our DVD drive so these results are representative of actual installation performance.
The Raptors once again finish at or near the top in our gaming tests due to their rotational and random access speeds. Our 7K1000 drive finishes ahead of the other 7200rpm drives with a great deal of benefit going to the 32 MB cache and high sustained transfer rates. In the RAID 0 results we see the Raptor scores improving 38% in The Sims2 and 55% in BF2. The 7K1000 benefits greatly from RAID 0 in these tests with improvements of 50% in The Sims2 and 90% in BF2 with the Raptors once again showing their strength in gaming.
We need to remember these tests reflect pure hard drive performance and will be mitigated by the overall system platform as we will see in our application tests. These tests are basically designed around continual read/write requests that favor large cache sizes, properly tuned firmware, and high sustained transfer rates.
iPeak Game Play Tests
The iPeak based Game Play tests are centered on the benefits of having a hard disk that can load non-linear or sequential data files quickly without interrupting the flow of the game.
In game play the RAID 0 setups hold a 7% to 12% advantage in these benchmarks. We noticed in the trace files that performance improved only when the game levels changed. The best overall gaming performance with a SATA drive is still provided by the Raptors. However, considering the space, noise levels, and cost per GB advantages of the Hitachi drive, we are willing to change our recommendation for most users (though plenty will feel 1TB is too big and would rather go with a 500GB model).
The iPeak based Video/Audio benchmarks are designed around simulating media encoding and HTPC activities. These are basic benchmarks at this time but this section will be expanded once we start testing under Vista. Our change to a better performing dual core processor will assist us in maintaining a balance between the CPU and Storage systems during the trace file creation and benchmarking processes. These benchmarks are CPU intensive in nature but also require a balanced storage system with the ability at times to handle read and write requests simultaneously in a very efficient manner.
The AnyDVD benchmark is heavily weighted to write requests. The results show a common pattern in write intensive situations with the RAID 0 setups improving about 66% over their single drive counterparts. The 7K1000 scores particularly well in these write intensive benchmarks due to its areal density and large cache design.
The Nero Recode 2 benchmark is weighted to streaming read requests at the start of the test but is balanced by continuous write operations during the encoding process. This benchmark is one of the most demanding ones in our test suite with the disk being active the entire trace file with several 100% utilization peaks. The results show an almost 93% improvement in hard disk performance with RAID 0. We believe this is one of the few tests where RAID 0 on the desktop will make an actual difference in real-world performance.
The individual drive results surprised us as we expected the Hitachi with its 32 MB cache and high sustained transfer rates to score near the Raptors. However, it turns out after reviewing the trace file results it was obvious that the 7K1000 was hampered by its inability to process large data blocks in sequential order efficiently as it had a number of buffer overruns during the read portion of the tests. This indicates to us the drive firmware is probably tuned for non-sequential read/writes as the rest of our tests indicate. The 32 MB cache should have easily compensated for any potential large block issues in this test.
iPeak Game Installation Tests
Our iPeak based Game Installation benchmarks simply show the ability of the hard drive to write data as quickly as possible to the disc based upon the installation software instructions. As detailed in our iPeak setup description we installed the games from our source drive in order to eliminate the optical drive bottleneck. In separate application timing we witnessed basically the same percentage spread when installing the games via our DVD drive so these results are representative of actual installation performance.
The Raptors once again finish at or near the top in our gaming tests due to their rotational and random access speeds. Our 7K1000 drive finishes ahead of the other 7200rpm drives with a great deal of benefit going to the 32 MB cache and high sustained transfer rates. In the RAID 0 results we see the Raptor scores improving 38% in The Sims2 and 55% in BF2. The 7K1000 benefits greatly from RAID 0 in these tests with improvements of 50% in The Sims2 and 90% in BF2 with the Raptors once again showing their strength in gaming.
We need to remember these tests reflect pure hard drive performance and will be mitigated by the overall system platform as we will see in our application tests. These tests are basically designed around continual read/write requests that favor large cache sizes, properly tuned firmware, and high sustained transfer rates.
iPeak Game Play Tests
The iPeak based Game Play tests are centered on the benefits of having a hard disk that can load non-linear or sequential data files quickly without interrupting the flow of the game.
In game play the RAID 0 setups hold a 7% to 12% advantage in these benchmarks. We noticed in the trace files that performance improved only when the game levels changed. The best overall gaming performance with a SATA drive is still provided by the Raptors. However, considering the space, noise levels, and cost per GB advantages of the Hitachi drive, we are willing to change our recommendation for most users (though plenty will feel 1TB is too big and would rather go with a 500GB model).
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
48 Comments
View All Comments
MadAd - Saturday, April 21, 2007 - link
<quote>Sorry but saving even 5 secs out of 10, 5 times a day is not work the extra money to me</quote>I take it you dont play battlefield 2 then. Having just two or three seconds advantage on each mapchange can mean the difference between a round flying a jet or helo, or a few seconds later watching everyone else fly off and being left with a humvee (if you are very lucky) or nothing at all.
Of course not all games have this problem however with bf2 when there are 32 players a side and only 2 jets each then its the quickest in that gets first picks, and if it takes running raid 0 just to pick up that extra second or two, then so be it.
ShadowdogKGB - Saturday, April 21, 2007 - link
My four little Hitachi 80gigs in R0 will load the single player Daging Oilfields in 18-20 seconds. Hows that for real world performance. Or maybe somebody from the church of the anti-raid can explain that away for me. My point of contention from this article is that the author went out of his way to denigrate the concept of raid. And another point is that you don't buy a 1 terabyte hard drives just to put them in raid, and especially put them in raid 0. These babies are for storage. You're definitely are not going to want 2 Terabytes of data sitting on a fragile Raid 0. No, this article is just plain skewed. Now there's gonna be a bunch of knuckle heads pointing to these benchmarks and saying "See? See? I told you so!" Yeah, HL2 Lost Coast. That's not even a real game. And The Sims2? Oh please. Yeah that's real world performance figures right there. Bleh. I'm no programmer or mathematician but I could have done a more decent article on this subject than this amateur.Axbattler - Friday, April 20, 2007 - link
I do not buy the 'extra money' argument that much (**). It's not like performance is the only (*possible) gain from striping two drives. The second drive get you extra capacity, and as long as people choosing to go RAID-0 are using the extra space, then they are not paying a financial premium over buying two drives and running them separately (unless they need to purchase a RAID controller). To me, the main cost from going RAID-0, is the added risk in case of failure.* Though I am in the school of thought that RAID-0, do not provide significant performance boost in the majority of the cases, I do find gains more often than penalties (from overhead).
Regarding from the article results, I am not surprised by the game loading results. I do, however suspect that the performance benefit of RAID-0 may be more noticeable in XP boot up time however (whether that is important enough, I'll shrug to it. Not my cash).
The file copy result make me wonder if there is not a bottleneck elsewhere though.
7.55 *1024 / 100 = 77.312 MB/sec on average. That's the transfer rate of a single drive.
** I do make an exception to people stripping Raptor's. I can't think of many desktop users who have enough 'performance sensive' applications (OS, apps, games - as opposed to multimedia files for instance) they use regularly - so much that they would need a second Raptor in the same rig. I do suspect that those users are really going for the bragging right rather than the 'free performance'.
Lastly, I wonder if RAM Disks, in their current form, are really faster the fastest SCSI drives at loading games. I seem to remember benchies of i-RAM some time ago showing it to edge the 150GB Raptor by not that much.
Griswold - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Absolutely agree. The only winner is the storage industry.gramboh - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
No kidding, been waiting for the Seagate for a while. It will also be nice to see 250GB platters (x4) on a 1TB drive. I'm running 2x 7200.10 500's right now and am happy with them. I'd like 1TB to come out to push drive costs down so I use a few for external back-up.BoberFett - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Anybody who stripes drives of this size is asking to lose a lifetime's worth of data. Even assuming it's data than can be reassembled such as ripped or downloaded music and movies, the time required to reassemble that data is pretty significant.goinginstyle - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Glad to see you guys still telling it like it is with RAID 0. I am just waiting on the comments to come in from people who swear it lets them operate their systems at light speed. This drive seems to be really nice but I will wait for the Seagate 1TB to come out before making an upgrade decision. When is it coming out?Gary Key - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
The Seagate 1TB drives are due out in four to six weeks according to the last information we had from them.