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
Hard Disk Performance: HDTune 2.53
Our first screenshot is the Hitachi drive with Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) and Native Command Queuing (NCQ) turned on in RAID 0 operation with the second screenshot showing the same configuration with a single drive. The RAID 0 setup shows a 98% increase in the minimum transfer rate and a 41% increase in the average sustained transfer rate. The maximum transfer rate also increases 41% although the burst rate is slightly lower. We believe HD Tune has a bug as the RAID 0 results indicate access times improving slightly when in reality they should not change or perhaps even increase slightly. Our HD Tach results bear this out so we will ignore the reported improvements in RAID 0 access times with this program.
The third screenshot is the RAID 0 results with AAM off and NCQ on. The transfer rates are basically the same with the only difference being a further reduction in access times compared to our first RAID 0 test result. We noticed the same drop in access times when turning off AAM during our single drive testing in the first article. Although the access times are improved we believe the benefits in the acoustics department outweigh the slight performance improvements we noticed in our application tests. We found that enabling AAM usually did not alter the test results more than 1% and at times the scores were a tie.
Hard Disk Performance: HD Tach 3.0
We are also including HD Tach results for review. Once again the order of the screenshots is the same as in our HDTune results. In this benchmark we see a 50% increase in the average read rates and a 52% increase in burst speeds over the single drive configuration with access times remaining the same in the AAM on /NCQ on tests. Our RAID 0 results with AAM off show an improvement in access times and sustained transfer rates while burst rates decline slightly compared to our other RAID 0 test results. While these numbers are impressive, we will have to see if they translate directly to improved application scores.
Our first screenshot is the Hitachi drive with Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) and Native Command Queuing (NCQ) turned on in RAID 0 operation with the second screenshot showing the same configuration with a single drive. The RAID 0 setup shows a 98% increase in the minimum transfer rate and a 41% increase in the average sustained transfer rate. The maximum transfer rate also increases 41% although the burst rate is slightly lower. We believe HD Tune has a bug as the RAID 0 results indicate access times improving slightly when in reality they should not change or perhaps even increase slightly. Our HD Tach results bear this out so we will ignore the reported improvements in RAID 0 access times with this program.
The third screenshot is the RAID 0 results with AAM off and NCQ on. The transfer rates are basically the same with the only difference being a further reduction in access times compared to our first RAID 0 test result. We noticed the same drop in access times when turning off AAM during our single drive testing in the first article. Although the access times are improved we believe the benefits in the acoustics department outweigh the slight performance improvements we noticed in our application tests. We found that enabling AAM usually did not alter the test results more than 1% and at times the scores were a tie.
Hard Disk Performance: HD Tach 3.0
We are also including HD Tach results for review. Once again the order of the screenshots is the same as in our HDTune results. In this benchmark we see a 50% increase in the average read rates and a 52% increase in burst speeds over the single drive configuration with access times remaining the same in the AAM on /NCQ on tests. Our RAID 0 results with AAM off show an improvement in access times and sustained transfer rates while burst rates decline slightly compared to our other RAID 0 test results. While these numbers are impressive, we will have to see if they translate directly to improved application scores.
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photoguy99 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
You have tested XP 32-bit which uses the "ScsiPort" storage system.This artificially limits results using Raid.
Vista 32, Vista x64, and XP x64 all use the "StorPort" storage system, which is much faster and doesn't limit Raid results.
You could add 4 or 8 drives in Raid 0 and your transfer rates would not change much.
This should really be part of the discussion for the article.
yyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Funny that, last time I personally did a dirrect comparrison of a 3xRAID0 array in Vista, it was 30-40MB/s slower comparred to the same array in XP Pro.Nothing changed, only the OS.
photoguy99 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Perhaps in your case the Vista driver was not as optimized as the XP driver or was not using storport.However, it is absolutely invalid to benchmark raid performance on XP 32-bit if your goal is to test hardware rather than OS specific results.
Microsoft reference:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms803198....">http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms803198....
AllanLim - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
http://kakaku.com/item/05300415786/">http://kakaku.com/item/05300415786/Along with every other pc component, this probably comes at 20-30% premium compared to Stateside when it becomes available, but at least you can but it here.
Myrandex - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Two 250GB drives in Raid 0. I dunno, I still feel that it helps with some load times on large maps on games and large numbers of file transfers at once, but I could be full of it. I do keep an off disk backup though that is pretty current.Jason
Sunrise089 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Sorry to double-post, but the end of the article says:" As stated in both articles, we believe leaving AAM and NCQ turned provides the best user experience with this drive."
I think there should be an "on" or "off" after "turned".
Sunrise089 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
I have a long-running arguement with another PC enthusiest about the relative merit of RAID 0. Some people just cannot get it through their heads that no matter how great the idea sounds, the performance just isn't justified by the cost. At all. With video card price/performance scaling perfectly, and CPU and memory scaling at least OK, it's insane to spend hundreds of dollars on a second hard drive and gain a few percentage points in real-world tests. Thanks Anandtech for keeping the real-world focus of these articles.mesyn191 - Saturday, April 21, 2007 - link
Depends how its done...These software RAID controllers (yes NVRAID, Intel Matrix RAID, Silicon Image 3112/4 etc, Promise, Highpoint are all software RAID controllers that often act more like storage subsystem DE-celerators and often slow things down...) that Anandtech keeps using to demonstrate the pointlessness of RAID 0 really only prove how crappy software RAID controllers are. If you use a "real" enterprise class RAID controller that has a dedicated CPU and significant cache you'll see some real world performance improvements, even with doing things like loading games which is a far from ideal work load for RAID 0. The problem is most of these "real" RAID controllers tend to cost ~$300, and that is for a cheap one, high end versions can easily cost thousands of dollars and most people don't want to spend that much on storage. Most of these enterprise class controllers also tend to have issues working with desktop motherboards, they're really meant for use in server motherboards and so they won't even boot up properly in alot of them, just read up on all the issues people tend to have getting the Areca 1210 (probably the most commonly used enterprise class RAID card in the enthusiast PC crowd) PCIe RAID cards working in commodity consumer grade motherboards.
Of course another nice thing about those enterprise class RAID controllers is most of them support multiple levels of RAID at the same time, so you can have a RAID 0 set and a RAID 5 set on the same bunch of hard drives, providing you a good way to safe guard your data and get a performance benefit.
PenGun - Friday, April 20, 2007 - link
K .... maybe you can tell me how I'm gonna get a solid write of 150MB/sec any other way. My camera in HD SDI needs to move that much data.RAID 0 or perhaps RAID 5 (to be tested soon) is the only way. 4 Western Digital 500G drives is my way of handling that fire hose of data.
Oh go back to your games it really does not matter, it's just my problem right now. It is my desktop when it's full. It's easier to crunch the massive files in situ.
yyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Some people just can not seem to get it through their heads, that not everyone plays games, or surfs the web, on a home desktop PC. Video editing applications that require 65MB/s substained transfers rates, will require either a very fast disk, or two lesser drives striped.
Since most enterprise drives cost an arm and a leg, I think running RAID0 for this application, or something that NEEDS the throughput justifies the cost. Now, I personally DO run RAID0 on my home desktop, and I think it is more than justified, but I do not expect it to work wonders, and I definately know, it will not make my system boot faster, will not make a First Person Shooter faster (except, perhaps level load times, which is pretty much moot).
Now, Imagine spending 2x $400 for RAID1 . . . that is what I call a waste of money, although, with these hitachi drives, who knows how reliable they are. The point here, being, you can not tell anyone what they need, or want in a desktop, because you really have not a clue what they really need / want. This being said, RAID0 for most people probably is overkill.