Western Digital Raptor Performance

[Toejedi]

I have purchased 2 Western Digital Raptor 36GB sata drives and would like to hear from others as to their experiences/performance.

PC Specs:

Athlon 3200+ FSB 400
ASUS A7N8x Rev 2.0 Mobo
WD Raptor 36GB X 2
Corsair TWINX 3200 LLPT 1GB Memory
Radeon 9700 Pro
Soundblaster Audigy

I have the 2 drives setup as a striped RAID config using the onboard raid controller (Silicon Image) on my ASUS A7N8X Rev 2.0 motherboard.

I have downloaded the latest HD Tach version 3 and I am only getting a throughput of around 90MB and a response time of 9 milliseconds. This seems slow to me.

I have double checked that Windows Write Caching is enabled and but still feel that the performance is slow.

Does anyone have an idea as to what could be causing it???

 

[ragiepew]

I personally dont have any raptors (i've got 3 2nd gen X15 SCSI drives) but info from a friend w/ two 76gig striped raptors says they are very very nice and quick. Mind you, he's coming from two x15's striped and he's said performance is very comprable...

 

[LED]

That seems about right and remember the CD Tach 3.0 is still in BETA Form. I use to run the Raotors in RAID0 on a very similar set-up but switch to a apir of Hitachi's for that Rig, moving the Raptors over to an Intel Set-up. I posted results along with others oon that Benchy in NFS4 thread

 

[aug1516]

So far the new version of HD Tach seems to be giving very inconsistent results when used to benchmark Raid arrays of any kind, SCSI, IDE, or SATA. Have you tried any other benchmarks with them yet?

 

[Toejedi]

I tried Sandra and the score was around the 71MB mark.... not very good....

Any ideas anyone???

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: Toejedi
I tried Sandra and the score was around the 71MB mark.... not very good....

Any ideas anyone???

If that's burst then yes it is bad. If that's the sustained speed then that's excellent! And depending on your stripe size your response time could go up to 9ms.

-Por

 

[Toejedi]

Sandra reports:

Drive index: 71MB

BUffered Read: 83MB
Sequential Read: 90MB
Random Read: 40MB
Buffered Write: 84MB
Sequential Write: 88MB
Random write: 54MB
Average Access Time: 14ms

This stats seem bad to me. I thought the raptor was capable of at least <9millisecond access times.

I cannot remember what stripe/cluster size I set it too, I think its 64kb... Do you think setting it lower may improve performance although I would have said that regardless of that the drives should be benching better than above...

 

[Toejedi]

The HD Tach states:

Burst Speed: 119.9mbps
Average Read: 90.1 mbps

Random Access: 8.9ms

SO is Sandra way out?? Or is anything wrong??