Hard disk access times and burst speed

**JimBowy** · Moderator Joined: 02 Aug 2003 Posts: 1627

I'm doing some research here to verify if my RAID array is healthy. I have 2x Maxtor 80GB ATA133 7,200RPM Hard disks in RAID-0 running on a HighPoint 454 PCI Raid Controller.

Today I ran HDTach 3.0
Company site: http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach# (Scroll down to DOWNLOAD)

Here are my results:
- Random Access Time: 16.6ms
- CPU Utilization: 7% (+/- 2%)
- Average Read: 80.7MB/s
- Burst Speed: 111.5MB/s

Question is, should I be concerned about the crappy access time? Single drivers get ~13.9ms w/2% CPU Utilization but an average read of only 45.3MB/s.

Tell me your setup and the results you get!

T-shirt · Posted: Thu, 12 May 2005 18:58:24 Post Subject:

yes, something is wrong. generally on RAID 0 I would expect access time to drop to (not quite) half the single drive speed (say around 60%).
as long as the RAID is defragged their should be some config tweaking you can do to improve that number. (it might require rebuilding the RAID with different cluster sizes or ??

BeerCheeze · Posted: Thu, 12 May 2005 19:04:26 Post Subject:

This is what I get on my RAID-0 Array with 2 80GB Maxtor 7,200RM 8MB Cache drives. This is on a Abit KR7A-R board.

Shadowsilence · Posted: Thu, 12 May 2005 19:50:17 Post Subject:

With two 120 seagate sata 8mb catch I have, 12.8ms random access, 24% CPU utilization, average read 52.7 and burst of 101.2. Used on the onboard sata, so... mine sucks Wink

**JimBowy** · Moderator Joined: 02 Aug 2003 Posts: 1627

So anybody have any ideas to bring down these access times???

I've got 64bit clusters right now.

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 12 May 2005 21:13:00 Post Subject:

Cheeze... you say RAID 0, but your image says RAID 1.

Here is my RAID 1 score, attached. I don't like the spike at the end of mine...

To increase your score... Do a degrag,reboot, and go straight into the test with nothing running. Laughing

How full are the drives?

BeerCheeze · Posted: Thu, 12 May 2005 21:23:30 Post Subject:

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 12 May 2005 21:52:46 Post Subject:

My first post was before a defrag... After I picked up a few points across the board, lost the spike at the end, and dropped a little on the access time...

BeerCheeze · Posted: Thu, 12 May 2005 22:04:31 Post Subject:

OK.. here's my dually It's a Promise FastTrak TX2 Plus and 2 Hatachi 160GB SATA Drives RAID 0

**JimBowy** · Moderator Joined: 02 Aug 2003 Posts: 1627

I checked my windows directory and it was ~23GB.... Found a folder c:\windows\csc which contained 17GB of "offline files" from my server.

I disabled offline files and now I'm trying to delete everything. Then, I'll have a lot more space on c:\ (most of my drives however are pretty full...) almost time for a new hard disk.

Throwing a 3rd 80GB harddrive into the array couldn't hurt, right?

After a defrag hopefully my numbers will be better!