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Hard drives for SW purposes

Hey all, My DIY workstation project continues...

I am looking at hard drives and wondering about real world performance for SW sessions

There seems to be a few avenues to go down and I am not altogether convinced the pursuit of disk speed is that important a factor in daily SW work.

Starting with RAID0 - Previously (old pc) I have used this with PATA disks believing it gave a boost to performance. I have the block size set at 64k. According to a benchmark I get not less than 80mb/s across the entire 500GB set like this and a max of 100mb/s. Do I need 500GB? ah, no, actually...but they just keep making them big and bigger... OK seems fast to me for older disks however I have been reading here and there and it would seem for the most part RAID0 does not actually give any tangible boost except for certain tasks like copy,unzip and defrag...hmmm...I thought it was peppier but... I guess another benefit you could say was that the RAID controller was sustaining speed across the entire disk better than a solo disk which falls off to say 60mb/s... but then I don't use that much..

Does anyone have sound evidence that RAID makes SW noticeably faster? By that I mean modelling parts /make assy ,dwgs, rebuilds etc. OK and I know you can RAID all sorts of disks...not being specific about that -

OK so next avenue - Big fast SATA like a Seagate Barracuda 500 or 750GB, or WD Caviar SE16

640GB. These new disks are very fast - getting up to the old Raptors - except for access time where they are well behind (or at least on paper) In the real world is the access time that relevant? What's a few ms in the scheme of things? I don't seem to be sitting waiting on a few ms when rebuilds take minutes... If I RAID two of these big drives ( if it is even worth doing) it will poke through a lot of mb/s and the cost is still less than a 300GB VelociRaptor on its own. Admittedly though even 150GB is a useful size for me so I don't think I am ever going to need 1.5Tb....its well..they just keep making them big and bigger..and they happen to be faster ( yeah I know they are coming out with a 1.5TB disk soon...)

OK next -

10000rpm Raptors and 15000rpm SCSI disks. Now I know a lot of folks will automatically reach for one or two of these as the thing to have for a workstation but I am unconvinced. Yes they are fast and responsive on paper but are they worth the extra cost for less capacity? Presumably they are also somewhat more noisy... If you slashed out on some of these what do you think objectively now about them?Are you startled by the speed increase or are they just helping save a few seconds a day that are just as easily lost somewhere else?

Finally SSD- Very expensive although the price is coming down fast I think Samsung have a 32GB out now for US$160 The better of these seem to have similar performance to the best hard drives but have virtually no access lag and there is no fall off across the GB and you can RAID them. However I read that for some tasks SSD do not perform well - I think it was random read/write -can't remember-..possibly it is some task SW performance would be hurt by? Has anyone information that says SSD will seriously help out for CAD? Not meaning the benefits of no moving parts,noise,fast boots etc.

Related to disk set up - Has anyone really noticed any real improvement from having the pagefile on another separate disk? and if so is that for very large assys or even small ones? Again I am not really concerned with ms

-------------------------------- So folks if any groupie has some experience , info or profound opinion on the subject of disks for SW I would appreciate you sharing it. As I say I am after tangible benefit rather than benchies and repeated theory. thanks Neil

Reply to
neil
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I installed a pair of VelociRaptors last week as SATA drives. Have a look at them.

Reply to
John R. Carroll

Jon, well the thing is that as knowledgeable as they might be they are not CAD users and aren't familiar with the work flow of SW. ...plenty of gamers and enthusiasts ready with ideas for sure...

Looking at some of the forum posts at Tom's though it seems to bear out what I have thought - that Raptors have a small edge that doesn't deliver that much esp. in respect of the cost margin...or at least in those particular uses...

I see one guy there talking about how he is returning raptors because they are actually slower and noisier in RAID than the 7200SATA set up he had.... not sure about that case though..

What I want to know is how these thing pan out in real use. If access times really do help CAD - the only real benefit I can see in the Raptor specs - then going for SSD with no lag ought to be even better.(?)

Here in NZ looking at online suppliers the new 300GB raptor presently is 3x the cost of a WD 640GB. I am not sure it makes sense to buy one... If you are happy to pay a premium price for high specs what about SSD instead?

Looking at my new install on the old faithful pc XPpro, Office SBE, SW2005 and various drivers, readers and other bits consume about 7.2 GB - add in some extra space and pagefile and 16GB could take care of the basics - add in another SSD in RAID0 gives 32 gb. This could be enough space for a CAD only situation...or more likely the min capacity of SSD will be 32GB each so 64GB basic..fine..tolerable for me... If you wanted you could put in say a 320GB 7200rpm drive as well for bulk storage...

If you look at this page

formatting link
you can see how SSD are for the workstation I/O benchmark in comparison to laptop drives - however what does that mean to a SW jockey actually? i dont know..that is the problem. Thats why I am asking here about peoples experience of various drive set ups.

BTW a VelociRaptor scores 1280 in that same test and other raptors about

1100 whilst the best of the 7200rpm disks come in about 750-825 so apparently SSD is not so hot despite the no lag spec... So maybe quick boot ups but not a lot of good in SW use? dunno.... If SSD improve further and the price comes down it seems they might only be on par with the best mech drives?

So my big question relates to actual seat of the pants experience. Does it actually matter much what you use for SW??

thanks for the reply though

Reply to
neil

One of the guys here bought 10Krpm drives a couple of years back when they were the ticket. He was disappointed in their performance, as he didn't notice any improvment. He had quite a bit more trouble with his computer that seemed to be attributable to the hard drives. The small size eventually caught up to him as well. He has since moved on to another job and the fellow who is getting his computer will be putting in new drives in a raid configuration that our IT guys like.

I've got raid 10 on my machine using 7200 rpm SATA drives. I didn't notice any big improvement in start up or file load times, but I didn't do any testing either. This seems like a pretty good setup, as I should have pretty good I/O speed and fault tolerance as well. It was cheaper than SCSI or high rpm drives of lower capacity.

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Steiger

hmmm... but windows will only use 2gb for an application in its native setting... so you have the 3gb switch enabled and the min/max pagefile is 4gb? and the I-RAM is definitely helping you handle v.large SW files better?

I understand the memory is interfaced by SATA and you are limited by that bandwidth so a 300mb/s SATA-2 vs 150 would give better numbers however to summarise your present experience the pc feels a bit smoother but the actual performance of the various tasks in a days SW work are not significant? i.e. although you may be working with a large file you couldn't handle well in

2gb before the actual rebuild times etc etc have not changed...or perhaps 5-10% or so?

Sorry to quiz you -all info helps- and others reading here may find it interesting too

Reply to
neil

yeah I am leaning toward just SATA perhaps in RAID as well.

Fault tolerance story to share with folks:

The hard disks I have on my old pc are actually the second set. The first ones in RAID0 died prematurely together when we had a sudden power outage here at home.

I read in the local paper a few days later that someone having a 21st party had let off a tinsel streamer that went into the substation a few houses along from the happy event killing the transformer in a pyrotechnic display worth seeing ....about 2km away my pc stopped stone dead landing the heads on the first partition...

Although I recovered almost all of the data from the other partitions with rat like cunning the drives themselves were unusable for any new install :o( Needless to say replacing the disks, retrieving the data, fresh install of everything etc etc was a substantial time waster. In this case RAID0+1 would not have helped

OK so lesson learned - on UPS (with surge protection) now ;o)

Reply to
neil

The idea was not to increase memory size but to extremely improve transfer between swap file, yes I know there is nothing like extra memory, but also there is no other HD as fast as this one, so if I can't add any more memory the only other way is to speed up swap. Plus it is separate physical drive from OS, just this makes big difference.

And this drive is FAST even with SATA-1, just to format it takes about same time as create new folder on regular drive

I guess gigabyte is working on SATA-2 version that can support more memory but I think this project is going to get "caned" because of SSDs

more info:

formatting link

mr.T

formatting link

I-RAM is definitely helping you handle

bandwidth so a 300mb/s SATA-2 vs 150 would

a bit smoother but the actual

although you may be working with a large

have not changed...or perhaps 5-10% or

Reply to
mr.T

thanks for the link - interesting read...impressive numbers...Vista + pen drives didn't really work out as well as they predicted though...

hmmm... so a 4 or 8 GB SATA-2 SSD if it were available and cheap might be a useful thing for CAD pagefiles...while retaining 7200SATA disks for the rest...perhaps a good blend of old and new at reasonable cost

thanks mr.T BTW you haven't said what your other disk(s) are?

Reply to
neil

Whatever is the chipset and smallest HD that comes with dell precision T5400 (sorry but don't have time to look it up)

We have all our files running over the networks so I don't care much about the HD, after watching the bandwidth for years now I can say that it is not the bottleneck it is just a ~50% spike per file compared to minutes of CPU time , plus keeping files locally wouldn't work in our company setup

And btw with the I-RAM I don't see / hear that much HD activity

I hope that helps.

drives didn't really work out as well as

useful thing for CAD pagefiles...while

at reasonable cost

Reply to
mr.T

The third generation Western Digitial VelociRaptors are just beginning to ship. These are 10k rpm SATA drives in a 2.5" form factor. The

160GB model is priced about $35 below the previous generation model. A 300GB model is also available.
formatting link
tested them on the SPECapc for SolidWorks benchmark.
Reply to
jimsym

I have run HD Tach test on my I-RAM, here are the numbers

formatting link
this is with swap on this drive (if it makes any difference)

I'm still looking for some good and free benchmark test to check for any performance gain from running swap file on this drive related to SolidWorks

Any recommendations?

Reply to
mr.T

That's the same test I used to establish my old PATA RAID0 numbers. My figures average 90mb/s but the access time is more like 15ms (15! yeah I know..) There is a very similar one called HDTune

formatting link
that has a listing of results and Tom's Hardware have some charts here
formatting link
you can compare numbers with.

I think that a couple of new generation 7200 in RAID0 would be up there with the 130mb/s of the I-RAM but of course nothing like 0.1ms.

The lack of info or a SW based test for various drive configurations and solutions is what prompted me to ask the group about their own seat of the pants experience.

If someone could come up with a SW macro that would distinguish the contribution of hard drive performance in come meaningful way it would be great.

Reply to
neil

thanks -...a 6-9% improvement over a 1TB WD for that platform.. not a lot..

Reply to
neil

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