When is your Hard Drive worked the hardest?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

GullyFoyle

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2000
4,362
11
81
EXITING BF1942, and trying to get back to the dang desktop. Seems to take forever.
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
1
81
Downloading multiple files off of DC++ gives the HD a workout, (and lots of fragments if you have the anti-frag option turned off). Defrag of course gives it a good work out, as well as transferring large files, and compressing/decompressing cd images.
 

Heretik

Senior member
Jan 12, 2000
931
0
0
Originally posted by: Boogak
Using Winrar to decompress a 4gb+ data file

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

I agree with both of those. As matter of fact, I'm doing both right now while downloading headers from usenet. Sounds like my PC is popping popcorn in there...
 

jose

Platinum Member
Oct 11, 1999
2,076
0
0
I don't know if you can do this but. Rebuilding a B-tree index on a 31.2 million records in a database takes awhile.

Regards,
Jose
 

w0ss

Senior member
Sep 4, 2003
365
0
0
Originally posted by: 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.

I will second that. I do that on a red hat system and I see that as slow. Also using a file eraser ie the ones that overwrite the file a few times so that the info is truly gone. I have used one of those on a 1 gig file and it took forever.
 

tynopik

Diamond Member
Aug 10, 2004
5,245
500
126
here is an interesting little thread about TCQ and NCQ and specifically what the Raptor implements and what cards support it

while maybe not strictly related to HDs, it would be great if you could answer questions that are repeatedly debated regarding pagefile location

on the system partition?
on a different partition?
on a different drive?
one part on each partition?
one part on each drive?
end of drive? (faster xfer rate)
middle of drive? (less head travel)

and maybe cover some sound measurements like over at silentpcreview

and maybe performance as it relates to heat and maybe how hot a drive can get before it starts dropping bits

and maybe the consequence of having a 2nd hd and/or cd drive on the same ide channel

and maybe cover solid state drives, including those that plug into the pci bus and those that plug into an ide cable, both persistent and non-persistent

and of course how different raid implementations affect everything

and maybe how different busses (PCI, PCI-X, PCIe) affect stuff

and maybe you could cover external storage options like usb2 and firewire and eSATA (highpoint proprietary) and scsi->sata bridges which seem popular

and since lots of people would like to add storage but don't have any space for expansion, a review of affordable SAN options (if that's not an oxymoron)

and maybe some of the more intelligent raid-1 controllers that should be able to approach raid-0 performance (on READ only)

and maybe test hardcore straight bandwidth by capturing hdtv (as in this thread) at over 300MB/s

and maybe i have too many ideads and questions and should just go to bed
 

tynopik

Diamond Member
Aug 10, 2004
5,245
500
126
Originally posted by: 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!

although i'm pretty sure that says more about the benefits of having an extra gig of ram than the supposed superiority of scsi

if you actually want to compare the drive/protocol performance either put a gig of ram in the machine or remove all the cache from the raid card
 

BespinReactorShaft

Diamond Member
Jun 9, 2004
3,190
0
0
I'd have to agree, it's transferring shagloads of gigabytes (e.g. your ill-gotten DivX movies) between partitions on the same physical drive. Extracting gigabyte-sized archives is another killer.
 

sharkeeper

Lifer
Jan 13, 2001
10,886
2
0
although i'm pretty sure that says more about the benefits of having an extra gig of ram than the supposed superiority of scsi

if you actually want to compare the drive/protocol performance either put a gig of ram in the machine or remove all the cache from the raid card

The HBA requires RAM (min 128) to function or it won't boot.

This shows the ability of the system to handle lots of random requests to and from the logical drive.

If I were to do this with a single 15k disk on a non-intelligent HBA, the results would be similar to the IDE/SATA just a little faster due to the lower latency of a faster spindle.

Paging 300% of PM to disk is torture to the physical disks without the assistance of intelligent host bus adapters!

Cheers!
 

gsellis

Diamond Member
Dec 4, 2003
6,061
0
0
Mine appears to be busiest scrubbing through the timeline of a large project in a NLE.
 

CVSiN

Diamond Member
Jul 19, 2004
9,301
0
0
Originally posted by: otispunkmeyer
would doing a complete virus scan give ur drive a hard time?

when moving 45000 pics and Vids from 1 drive to another....
large pics and vids...
 

Trey22

Diamond Member
Oct 31, 2003
5,540
0
76
Backing up my main drive to an external HD, and when loading Battlefield 1942 maps on my WD 80GB 8MB Cache HD.

Oh, and running SureDelete, which cleans the free space on my drive by writing 7 times to it using normal block sizes.
 

flexy

Diamond Member
Sep 28, 2001
8,464
155
106
defragging ok..just kidding....

() indexing pictures into database w/ ACDSEE..or using PaintShop to index/build thumbnails.

() playing asheron's call II with only 384MB. Ough...the horror....

() find files on the computer

() any virus checker doing a whole system-scan (probably my fav)
 

AnnoyedGrunt

Senior member
Jan 31, 2004
596
25
81
Running a large FEA Analysis (I guess that's redundant, eh?) and using up RAM.

I use Pro/E and Pro/Mechanica on a P4 1.5 Ghz with 1 GB RDRAM (yeah, yeah, it's an old machine).

-D'oh!
 
sale-70-410-exam    | Exam-200-125-pdf    | we-sale-70-410-exam    | hot-sale-70-410-exam    | Latest-exam-700-603-Dumps    | Dumps-98-363-exams-date    | Certs-200-125-date    | Dumps-300-075-exams-date    | hot-sale-book-C8010-726-book    | Hot-Sale-200-310-Exam    | Exam-Description-200-310-dumps?    | hot-sale-book-200-125-book    | Latest-Updated-300-209-Exam    | Dumps-210-260-exams-date    | Download-200-125-Exam-PDF    | Exam-Description-300-101-dumps    | Certs-300-101-date    | Hot-Sale-300-075-Exam    | Latest-exam-200-125-Dumps    | Exam-Description-200-125-dumps    | Latest-Updated-300-075-Exam    | hot-sale-book-210-260-book    | Dumps-200-901-exams-date    | Certs-200-901-date    | Latest-exam-1Z0-062-Dumps    | Hot-Sale-1Z0-062-Exam    | Certs-CSSLP-date    | 100%-Pass-70-383-Exams    | Latest-JN0-360-real-exam-questions    | 100%-Pass-4A0-100-Real-Exam-Questions    | Dumps-300-135-exams-date    | Passed-200-105-Tech-Exams    | Latest-Updated-200-310-Exam    | Download-300-070-Exam-PDF    | Hot-Sale-JN0-360-Exam    | 100%-Pass-JN0-360-Exams    | 100%-Pass-JN0-360-Real-Exam-Questions    | Dumps-JN0-360-exams-date    | Exam-Description-1Z0-876-dumps    | Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps    | Dumps-HPE0-Y53-exams-date    | 2017-Latest-HPE0-Y53-Exam    | 100%-Pass-HPE0-Y53-Real-Exam-Questions    | Pass-4A0-100-Exam    | Latest-4A0-100-Questions    | Dumps-98-365-exams-date    | 2017-Latest-98-365-Exam    | 100%-Pass-VCS-254-Exams    | 2017-Latest-VCS-273-Exam    | Dumps-200-355-exams-date    | 2017-Latest-300-320-Exam    | Pass-300-101-Exam    | 100%-Pass-300-115-Exams    |
http://www.portvapes.co.uk/    | http://www.portvapes.co.uk/    |