mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Sorry, long post!
Admittedly, my OS install is long in the tooth; installed almost exactly 4 years ago. I am dreading reinstallation of all the sw, the utilities, the tweaks, etc.
But while the system is generally ok, disk throughput seems poor.
I had 2 Hibachi 250 GB SATA drives in the system. These began to develop bad sectors (or so I believed). I had purchased 2 Samsung 320GB SATA drives in 2007, but never installed them. I now purchased an additional Hibachi 1TB drive (Deskstar 7K1000.C) with the intention of using the 3 drives.
I used an external drive to copy data from the old drives, replaced them with the 3 drives with the 1TB being the boot drive, and restored my OS image and data. I had many hiccups using the 1TB because Partition Magic 8 kept buggering it and I didn't realize it was PM.
I finally restored the OS image to the 1TB, but after booting, strange things happened. Some folders that I created 2 levels down from the root of C: were gone. Wordperfect, which was working before, now asks for the installation disk when I try to run it. I don't know what happened and if these symptoms are connected to the sluggish I/O.
All the drives have multiple partitions. The 1TB Hibachi seems especially slow.
After installing the new drives but before using them, I ran Hibachi's and Samsung's utilities extensively on the drives, and the reports came clean. Device Mangler looks good: I have one UDMA2, one UDMA 3 and three UDMA 6 drives (I have 2 opticals). Write caching is turned on for all the drives (I have a UPS as well). Event log shows nothing. BIOS settings were checked. SMART settings checked via SpeedFan (even the extended checks) rate as:
Hibachi: 91% for both fitness and performance (3 values are "Normal", the rest are "Very Good")
Sam-A: 100% for performance, 98% for fitness (all values are "Very Good")
Sam-B: 100% for performance, 98% for fitness (all values are "Very Good" except Airflow temperature = "Good".)
I ran some tests on all of them; no idea if performance is in the ballpark or piss-poor. The test file was a 2GB OS image file that was copied from one SATA drive to another. All partitions were fully defragged first.
For simplicity, I am calling the Hibachi Hib. The two 320GB Samsungs are named Sam-A and Sam-B. Sequence-wise, the system shoud see the Hibachi, then Sam-A then Sam-B. The swap file is on Sam-320-B in the first partition.
These are the results:
Do these numbers look normal?
Admittedly, my OS install is long in the tooth; installed almost exactly 4 years ago. I am dreading reinstallation of all the sw, the utilities, the tweaks, etc.
But while the system is generally ok, disk throughput seems poor.
I had 2 Hibachi 250 GB SATA drives in the system. These began to develop bad sectors (or so I believed). I had purchased 2 Samsung 320GB SATA drives in 2007, but never installed them. I now purchased an additional Hibachi 1TB drive (Deskstar 7K1000.C) with the intention of using the 3 drives.
I used an external drive to copy data from the old drives, replaced them with the 3 drives with the 1TB being the boot drive, and restored my OS image and data. I had many hiccups using the 1TB because Partition Magic 8 kept buggering it and I didn't realize it was PM.
I finally restored the OS image to the 1TB, but after booting, strange things happened. Some folders that I created 2 levels down from the root of C: were gone. Wordperfect, which was working before, now asks for the installation disk when I try to run it. I don't know what happened and if these symptoms are connected to the sluggish I/O.
All the drives have multiple partitions. The 1TB Hibachi seems especially slow.
After installing the new drives but before using them, I ran Hibachi's and Samsung's utilities extensively on the drives, and the reports came clean. Device Mangler looks good: I have one UDMA2, one UDMA 3 and three UDMA 6 drives (I have 2 opticals). Write caching is turned on for all the drives (I have a UPS as well). Event log shows nothing. BIOS settings were checked. SMART settings checked via SpeedFan (even the extended checks) rate as:
Hibachi: 91% for both fitness and performance (3 values are "Normal", the rest are "Very Good")
Sam-A: 100% for performance, 98% for fitness (all values are "Very Good")
Sam-B: 100% for performance, 98% for fitness (all values are "Very Good" except Airflow temperature = "Good".)
I ran some tests on all of them; no idea if performance is in the ballpark or piss-poor. The test file was a 2GB OS image file that was copied from one SATA drive to another. All partitions were fully defragged first.
For simplicity, I am calling the Hibachi Hib. The two 320GB Samsungs are named Sam-A and Sam-B. Sequence-wise, the system shoud see the Hibachi, then Sam-A then Sam-B. The swap file is on Sam-320-B in the first partition.
These are the results:
Code:
----------------------------
Source | Destin. | MB/S
----------------------------
Sam-B | Sam-A | 74.3
Sam-A | Sam-B | 71.8
----------------------------
Sam-A | HIB | 85.2
HIB | Sam-A | 80.7
----------------------------Do these numbers look normal?
