SCSI benchmarks

[TorinoGT24]

Well, I finally got everything hooked, and I don't think I am all that impressed. I have this setup:

IBM DDYS-T18350 10K rpm drive with 4mb cache-80-68 pin converter
Adaptec AHA-2940U2W ultra 2 wide scsi card (I know, it's kinda old)
Two device scsi round cable, with one terminator

In the sandra test, I got 21856 kb/s. The access time was 5ms, which was really the only thing that was better than my old IDE drive. My western digital 120gb drive was 28000 kb/s. Anyone have any idea what the deal is? Is it my old scsi card that lacks ultra 160 interface???
Any help would be great!!! Thanks in advance.

-Collin-

 

[dexvx]

FYI, Sandra sucks the big one on HDD tests.

I dont think not having a U160 controller means much. PCI is capped at 125MB/sec in optimal conditions and you never sustain 80MB/sec transfer rate. Getting a U160 or even a U320 HDD wouldnt be *much* limited by a U2W controller.

 

[TorinoGT24]

Well, that sounds about right. Can you recommend a good hard drive test software? HD tach??

-Collin-

 

[TorinoGT24]

Oh, one more thing.....do those results sound fair? Or are they lower than they should be?

-Collin-

 

[Pariah]

Pick up a 3 year old ATA drive and tell us how it compares to that IBM. How do 3 year old top of the line CPU's (1GHz Athlon) compare to today's average CPU?

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Pick up a 3 year old ATA drive and tell us how it compares to that IBM. How do 3 year old top of the line CPU's (1GHz Athlon) compare to today's average CPU?

I'd have to agree with Pariah on that one. IIRC, its probably a model older than 3 years old, and its still holding well to the top of the line ATA drives. I would try IOMeter, HDTach for starters. I have no doubt that the IBM drive will wipe the floor with any IDE drive when it comes to server benchmarks.

 

[TorinoGT24]

Well, what do you guys think my current scsi card is capable of in the way of sustained transfer speed. I'm just wondering if I should get a new card. Are there any faster 10k RPM drives out there?

-Collin-

 

[dexvx]

Most of the U320 10K drives are the newest generation. They are significantly faster than the oldest 10K drives. Think 7200 rpm IBM 180GXP versus one of the first 7200 rpm IDE drives. It will wipe the floor with it.

For Seagate, its the 10K.6, Maxtor is Atlas IV (I think), for Fujitsu its MAP. Even some of the older 10K drives for Seagate/Maxtor/Fujitsu will fare more than well.

 

[TorinoGT24]

Well, I've got one more drive to try out. It is the 9.2gb Cheetah 18xl. Again, 10k rpm with 4 mb cache. Think I should give that a go? Thanks!

-Collin-

 

[ledzepp98]

Well, what do you guys think my current scsi card is capable of in the way of sustained transfer speed

I have the same card with a seagate x15-36lp (second generation 15k rpm, 8meg cache). hdtach shows the transfer rate as ~56MB/s at the beginning of the drive and ~42MB/s at the end. you can decide if you need a faster scsi adapter...

 

[TorinoGT24]

well, that made my day. Maybe I will try my other drive, and if it isn't any better, I'll grab a 15k. Thanks again guys! One more thing, is there anything I could have hooked up wrong? I went into the scsi bios, and everything is set to operate at full speed, no limitations. Hmm...

-Collin-

 

[charlie21]

Originally posted by: TorinoGT24
Well, what do you guys think my current scsi card is capable of in the way of sustained transfer speed. I'm just wondering if I should get a new card.

U2W SCSI = 80 MB/sec. Even with overhead, you probably have at least 70 MB/sec useable bandwidth on the bus. With a single drive, you'll never get close to that. Keep your current card, unless you plan on adding more drives.

Sustained transfer speeds on a drive that old aren't going to be great. If that's what you're shooting for, you're better suited with an IDE RAID setup, it will be cheaper.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: TorinoGT24
well, that made my day. Maybe I will try my other drive, and if it isn't any better, I'll grab a 15k. Thanks again guys! One more thing, is there anything I could have hooked up wrong? I went into the scsi bios, and everything is set to operate at full speed, no limitations. Hmm...

-Collin-

You don't seem to be grasping what we are telling you. 3 year old drives are SLOW by today's standards. There is nothing wrong with the drive you have or the way you set it up. No matter what the interface or the drive, no matter how many 3 year old drives you go through, they will all be slower than what is available today. The Seagate 18XL is just as old as the IBM drive and won't be any faster.

 

[dexvx]

^

Oh I beg to differ. The X15 is nearly 3 years old and it can hold up to any IDE drive on the market today.

 

[SportSC4]

are you on winxp? winxp is horrible for scsi stuff for some odd reason. i think it was until sp3 for win2k before it was 'fixed'.

 

[Pariah]

Go to SR and compare the X15-36LP to current 8MB ATA drives in the 4 workstation benchmarks then realize the X15-36LP is considerably faster than the original X15. Any 15k drive will trounce ATA in complete random acess server environments with dozens of concurrent connections. This in no way mirrors what users at home do. The 2 10k drives here are another 7-8 months older than the X15.

 

[TorinoGT24]

I understand the old drives, I guess I'm just trying to get the best out of what I have rather than spend $$$ on a new one. Thanks for the advice though. Maybe I'm just in denial

-Collin-

 

[TorinoGT24]

Now for the dumb question....what's SR?

-Collin-

 

[mechBgon]

I just got back from installing my new Cheetah 15k.3 as my system drive in my work system. It displaces my Cheetah X15-36LP, which is now on a separate U160 card.

For TorinoGT24's benefit, the Cheetah 15k.3 is Seagate's present top-of-the-range 15000rpm U320 drive. The X15-36LP is the previous generation.

Afterwards, I did some benchmarking. I have a 516MB self-extracting file called toolbox.exe. I won't bore you with the details... here are the times that it took to self-extract this file, on this system:

Cheetah 15k.3 extracting file to itself: 1m 04sec
Cheetah X15-36LP extracting file to itself: 1M 50sec

and for the heck of it, Cheetah X15-36LP extracting file to Cheetah 15k.3: 22sec :Q (see why I wanted a second one now?)

Now here is the interesting thing: we had a spare Seagate 7200.7 IDE drive lying around. I threw it in there for the heck of it, thinking that it would be the whipping-boy of the two Cheetahs. Its time was not bad, though! :Q 1m 10sec, remarkable considering it has half the RPM and far slower seek times. So you see that today's IDE drives are not always slower just because of their lower RPMs. I will say in the X15-36LP's defense that it's not on the same type of SCSI card as the 15k.3.

Now, if I had done this decompression while simultaneously running a full-blown antivirus scan of the same hard drive, or some other ongoing I/O task that competed with the decompression, then the Cheetahs would be in their element. SCSI handles cross-traffic well, IDE doesn't.

 

[charlie21]

Originally posted by: TorinoGT24
Now for the dumb question....what's SR?

-Collin-

SR = Storage Review

 

[TorinoGT24]

Well, I found a killer deal on an IBM 36Z15 15K rpm drive. Is that one newer?

-Collin-

 

[dullard]

Originally posted by: Pariah
You don't seem to be grasping what we are telling you. 3 year old drives are SLOW by today's standards. There is nothing wrong with the drive you have or the way you set it up. No matter what the interface or the drive, no matter how many 3 year old drives you go through, they will all be slower than what is available today. The Seagate 18XL is just as old as the IBM drive and won't be any faster.

Pariah, I thought for sure in another SCSI thread many months ago I said exactly what you said, but back then you said I was wrong. Maybe I'm confusing you with someone else though.

So many people argue one benefit of SCSI is that they last forever and they can just keep putting it in their next computer 3, 4, 5, 6, etc years down the line. Yes SCSI is good, but who wants an old drive that far into the future? Today you can get many IDE drives that will easilly beat ANY 3 year old SCSI. TorinoGT24, you experienced exactly what you should - a drive that was great in its time isn't the best anymore.

While the IBM 36Z15 you mentioned is better than the first SCSI drive you mentioned, it still won't be something I'd recommed you buy. Link comparing it to your current ATA drive. Notice how the Western Digital ATA drive wins in almost everything that is important to a home user - gaming, office work, high-end workstation work, and bootup times. Yes the 36Z15 does well in server tasks, but are you running a server? I'll focus on the Gaming benchmark for now since most people are interested in that. The IBM 36Z15 is tied for 27th place in gaming. There are many faster SCSI and ATA drives than that - the top gaming drive is the Maxtor Atlas 15K (which is SCSI) and the top gaming ATA drive is the WD Raptor WD360GD. Either of those two drives will easilly be far faster than the IBM 36Z15 (link showing those three drives).

 

[Pariah]

SCSI still is much better when comparing generation to generation. You can't expect 3 1/2 year old technology to perform favorably with even average current technology, but SCSI gets quite close and will in some situations (servers) still perform much better. Again, compare 3 year old SCSI to 3 year old ATA. I still use all the SCSI drives I've bought as boot drives in various systems. I wouldn't even think of using a 3 year old ATA drive as a boot drive now. Not to mention I've had 3 or 4 ATA drives die since I bought my first SCSI drive. So on average, SCSI does have a longer useful life and better reliability.

 

[dullard]

Originally posted by: Pariah
SCSI still is much better when comparing generation to generation. You can't expect 3 1/2 year old technology to perform favorably with even average current technology, but SCSI gets quite close and will in some situations (servers) still perform much better. Again, compare 3 year old SCSI to 3 year old ATA. I still use all the SCSI drives I've bought as boot drives in various systems. I wouldn't even think of using a 3 year old ATA drive as a boot drive now. Not to mention I've had 3 or 4 ATA drives die since I bought my first SCSI drive. So on average, SCSI does have a longer useful life and better reliability.

No one ever denies that current SCSI is the best. But most often when someone is looking for performance on a budget they come with the choice: current ATA or 3 year old SCSI. That is where the comparison needs to be made. And if you went out and bought a new $50 ATA drive it would likely be faster than most of your years old boot drives (which is another common myth that keeping old drives as boot drives is faster than a new cheap drive).

 

[Pariah]

Moving a 2 or 3 year old SCSI drive to another system costs me nothing. Buying a new ATA drive does.