When is your Hard Drive worked the hardest?

[Anand Lal Shimpi]

I'm working on a *huge* series of Hard Drive articles that will hopefully be published over the next 2 - 3 months. The idea is to take real world testing to the next level to truly give you all the best possible I/O recommendations. The series of articles will cover everything from what drive to get to RAID controller performance and in much greater depth than you're used to.

What I would like to hear from you all is what you would like to see tested. When using your Windows machine, when do you feel that your hard drive is slowing you down the most - when do you feel like you could use a faster drive. Be as specific as possible with your responses, e.g. "When I'm launching Photoshop" or "Copying files" etc... Also try to keep your responses to single tasks only, but if there are situations that are especially taxing while multitasking you can list those as well.

I can't guarantee that we will be able to script every one of these scenarios into our benchmarks, but I will do my best to get as many of the most popular ones included as possible. Here's your chance to get the performance statistics that matter directly to you put into the reviews at AnandTech.

Thanks in advance

Anand

 

[sharkeeper]

Installing Windows XP Service Pack 2!

Cheers!

 

[Nickel020]

My HD is probably worked hardest when I am copying several files from one partition to another and copying each file seperately, i.e. not using Ctrl to highlight several files and then copy-paste but using copy-paste on every file seperately.
I would also like to see a Samsung SV1604N (5,400 RPM) being tested as this is a very good hard drive for "silent" PCs. It would be interesting to see how much worse this drive performs than the 7,200 RPM drives.

 

[Chaotic42]

I'm not sure if this is useable, but my drives always get bogged down when I'm running "apt-get dist-upgrade" in Debian.

 

[mechBgon]

1) When generating an Office Administrative Installation Point and integrating Office service packs and patches into it. I once made the mistake of trying this with a 5400RPM IDE drive. :frown:

2) When installing Office from an Office AIP that is located on the same hard drive that the installation is going to. Cheetah 15k.3 > WD 800JB by a factor of nearly 3x on this task.

3) When my system has launched into the lunch-hour antivirus scan while I'm trying to do other stuff. SCSI is my weapon of choice for that, obviously.

 

[pelikan]

Opening a Doom 3 level.

Edit: Thanks! Its nice to be asked what I want in an article.

 

[ROcHE]

Loading a map for the first time in Battlefield Vietnam.

 

[tynopik]

booting up

but don't just time a clean install of xp, load it up with as much junk as possible

office, visual studio, aim, getright, NORTON, zone alarm, etc, etc


what actually irritates me the most is loading stuff back in from swap

load up a set of apps, have a util eat memory to force all the other apps out to swap, and then time how long it takes to bring them all back in again

or similarly, once you have a lot of file types registered, the right click -> new menu takes forever to pop up in file explorer as it has to scan through ALL the registry entries

this becomes very annoying when you frequently work with large files and then try to create new folders. 2k's caching algorithm sucks and will push active programs out so it can try to cache this huge file you're only touching once, then you try to create a new folder and it takes forever for it to scan the registry again and generate the list of valid 'new' items

 

[Jeff7]

My hard drives rarely get heavy use; the following list are the most intensive things they do, but they don't often do these things every day. The only realy every-day thing my drives do is boot and load applications. Other than that, my drives have it fairly easy.

Decompressing 4GB+ archives
Defragmenting
Checkdisk
Backups
Program/OS Installation
File transfers

 

[Steve]

Ghosting or imaging, backups and restorations.

 

[tynopik]

also when downloading multiple things simultaneously, like lots of torrents, usenet, irc, emule, and some http simultaneously

could probably simulate by copying large files to 5 different partitions on same drive simultaneously (this might also be a good test of ncq/tcq)

 

[corkyg]

Agree with most all of the things cited above, but would add - when disk optimization is occuring, and backing up or cloning the drive.

 

[Boogak]

Using Winrar to decompress a 4gb+ data file

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Bittorrent. Seriously. The random-download sequence of most files thrashes your drive to hell.

Host a bunch of Linux ISOs or something like that on a gigabit LAN, then have people try to download 5 copies at once and see how they fare.

- M4H

 

[piasabird]

I think this is a perception thing. How can we know what really uses up the resources unless we have a way of watching what is going on?

What I mearn is unless we actually hear the hard drive or are monitoring it somehow this can be hard to determine. Is the Video not catching up or is the processor running hard or is it all just smoke and mirrors.

I would guess anytime you are writing huge amounts of data to a drive it works harder. For instance a hard drive may workreally hard during any memory intensive program or when running something like defrag or a full format or writing Zeros to the entire drive.

 

[FISHRULE]

My hard drive works very hard when I run Photoshop CS and use the file browser to view RAW files from my cameras. Opening Photoshop is also a strain. Shuffling my pictures from one hard drive to another also gives my HDDs a HUGE workout.

 

[iwantanewcomputer]

downloading and uploading multiple files at the same time.
opening games (doom, unreal tournament etc)
opening big dvd rips (700MB to 4 GB)
transfering many gigabytes of movies, music, games, straight from one hard drive to another

doing more than one of these at the same time

 

[Sideswipe001]

I know at work here, that some people open a file in Photoshop while applying some kind of conversion at the same time. I've seen that take up to 10 minutes to open a 250 MB file.

 

[bluewall21]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Bittorrent. Seriously. The random-download sequence of most files thrashes your drive to hell.

Host a bunch of Linux ISOs or something like that on a gigabit LAN, then have people try to download 5 copies at once and see how they fare.

- M4H

I concur. Bittorrent goes crazy on your hard drive.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

would doing a complete virus scan give ur drive a hard time?

 

[amdhunter]

I download a sh!tload of stuff off newsgroups using Grabit software. Hard drives go nuts when processing large groups. Decoding downloaded files and extracting takes a lot of hard drive time also...

 

[sharkeeper]

If you want to *rape* a hdd, limit your memory to 128MB in XP using MSCONFIG.

Open a 256MB (or larger) image in Photoshop. I did this to demonstrate how fast a high end SCSI RAID array with 1GB cache handled paging and it did quite well.

The similarly configured system with a single raptor was seriously slower and the seeking noise on the raptor sounded like a Chevy Sprint 3-banger running on Coleman fuel towing a sled up a hill. (If I thought it were possible for a hard drive to EXPLODE, I would've stopped it!)

Cheers!

 

[overclock]

encode a dvd using pinnacle studio. took my athlonxp 2500+ 3:50 to do a 1:45 movie. crunch crunch crunch.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: overclock
encode a dvd using pinnacle studio. took my athlonxp 2500+ 3:50 to do a 1:45 movie. crunch crunch crunch.

Dont believe that is entirely the hard drives fault

However... for me i would definately say any installation process. Installing programs are things that take up a lot of time if people stand back and look at it.

( the Head Guy posted)

-Kevin

 

[Texun]

Large transfers from drive to drive or another PC over an Ethernet connection.