Transform 'Cuda 7200.11 1.5tb into Velociraptor Killer

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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JamieG
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Location: Melbourne, Australia

Post by JamieG » Fri Jul 24, 2009 2:41 pm

Shamgar wrote:Oh, and kangaroos don't live in shopping centres. Although you can find the dead form in the refridgerator and freezer sections of the supermarket. Yes. People are allowed to eat their national emblem. Shame on them!
But peppered roo steak is tasty! A bit gamey though. Ah well, guess I'll go put on my suit and tie and figure out some other way to defile another of our national icons. Maybe I could sell the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Opera House to the Chinese? :lol:

</offtopic>

I did just notice that the 30Gb OCZ Vertex is on special at PCCG for $199 at the moment.... your $100 SSD may not be too far away Shamgar, if you can compromise on the capacity.

You could consider buying a notebook HDD and short stroking it (I am intrigued a little by the concept, but don't have a spare HDD around to try it) to see how it goes in the interim.

Shamgar
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Post by Shamgar » Sat Jul 25, 2009 9:38 am

JamieG wrote:I did just notice that the 30Gb OCZ Vertex is on special at PCCG for $199 at the moment.... your $100 SSD may not be too far away Shamgar, if you can compromise on the capacity.
Encouraging signs there. 30GB seems to be not quite worth it though. Even though I am a light user, I expect a bit more for my money, and the extra capacity may be useful down the track. 80,128,160 for $100-200 sometime in the future looks more worthwile IMO. When that day comes, I'll make sure I "hop to it" on my roo-mobile.
JamieG wrote:You could consider buying a notebook HDD and short stroking it (I am intrigued a little by the concept, but don't have a spare HDD around to try it) to see how it goes in the interim.
I'm using a notebook HDD as my system drive right now. It's 160GB and I actually do need most of the space for audio files and system backups. It's been playing up a bit (get errors in chkdsk). I think I need to erase the partitions and start over again. I have a pre-paritioned WD6400AAKS on hand, but I want to save that for a future build. I too am intrigued over the advantages of short stroking, but not enough to get me too stresssed over it.

JamieG
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Post by JamieG » Sat Jul 25, 2009 6:10 pm

Shamgar wrote:
JamieG wrote:I did just notice that the 30Gb OCZ Vertex is on special at PCCG for $199 at the moment.... your $100 SSD may not be too far away Shamgar, if you can compromise on the capacity.
Encouraging signs there. 30GB seems to be not quite worth it though. Even though I am a light user, I expect a bit more for my money, and the extra capacity may be useful down the track. 80,128,160 for $100-200 sometime in the future looks more worthwile IMO.
Yeah, I know what you mean about capacity. I bought the 60Gb Vertex and thought I would have heaps of storage space left - but only 10 Gb spare space right now! :roll:

Havoc
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Post by Havoc » Sun Jul 26, 2009 3:53 am

A related question:

If I use the standard partitioning tools in XP/Vista/Win7 am I guaranteed that the first partition is the furtherest out on the drive and the last partition furtherest in?

sandy keelow
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Post by sandy keelow » Sun Jul 26, 2009 7:05 am

Havoc wrote:A related question:
If I use the standard partitioning tools in XP/Vista/Win7 am I guaranteed that the first partition is the furtherest out on the drive and the last partition furtherest in?
I think all partitioning tools start at sector adress 0, then there are probably some exotic drives where sector 0 is on the innermost cylinder but on all drives I've ever had sector 0 has always been on the outermost cylinder... I can confirm at least that with W98/2000/XP and a "normal" HDD the answer to your question is yes.

Cryoburner
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Post by Cryoburner » Wed Jul 29, 2009 6:18 am

kal001 wrote: It does not matter, whether you have unallocated space or partitions on rest of the HDD. If you dont access it, performance will be the same. You can use the rest of the HDD for data, for example for backups. It does not have a sense to leave the rest of stroked drive totally unused. :!:
I agree. For things like application load times, there should be no perceptible difference in speed even if the drive head happens to be near the end of the disk. It might take a few extra milliseconds to move the head back to your application/OS partitions, but after that it will seek quickly near the start of the disk while loading all the necessary files and dlls required to start the program. The time required to move the head back to the start of the disk a single time is so insignificant that it shouldn't even be noticeable. The only times the long seeks really become a problem is when a program is accessing hundreds of files scattered around the disk, which if your drive is intelligently partitioned, shouldn't be a problem.

On my 640GB drive, I keep my OS and application partitions at the beginning of the disk, so all program and operating system files are together in the first 10% of available drive space. Following those is a larger games partition, followed by a storage partition covering over half the drive. If I install a new application or Windows update, it's guaranteed to be placed in the fastest part of the drive, alongside any related files.

Shamgar
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Post by Shamgar » Wed Jul 29, 2009 6:58 am

Cryoburner wrote:On my 640GB drive, I keep my OS and application partitions at the beginning of the disk, so all program and operating system files are together in the first 10% of available drive space. Following those is a larger games partition, followed by a storage partition covering over half the drive. If I install a new application or Windows update, it's guaranteed to be placed in the fastest part of the drive, alongside any related files.
I also have a 640GB (~596GB useable) drive which I partitioned similarly. I have firstly a small DOS partition, followed by OS&Apps; Unused; Storage; Downloads; System Images. You notice that I left the partition after OS unused. That's because I don't need a Games partition, yet I wanted to leave some space allocated before Storage. I can later use it for very large apps; virtual drive space; Linux or another Windows install.

BTW the drive is offline. I'm currently using a notebook drive partitioned similar to above although not as well thought out. This, along with disk errors on a partition is forcing me to erase the disk and start over again. Or I may even use the 640GB drive instead and use the notebook drive as storage. I am not worried about extracting maximum performance, as long as it is quiet and performs reasonably well. Considering I have made my mind up that I will not pay more than AUD$100 for a storage drive, be it HDD or SSD, I will live with what I have and make the most of it.

Terje
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Post by Terje » Sat Aug 01, 2009 7:57 pm

Wibla wrote:This isnt exactly news...

I partitioned the system drive in my P182 (Samsung F1 640GB) for speed myself, using this setup:

C: - boot/system - 60 GB
F: - games - 100GB
G: - backups/images - 426GB

This works great for me, as I seldom access the images, and both games and system files are solidly inside the 100+MB/s "band" on the drive.
Merge C and F.
The problem with multiple partitions in terms of performance is that they _force_ the drive heads to move a certain minimum distance even if you only use a little bit of each partition.

In this case, you have OS (and all related libraries) and swap file on C and applications on F.

The problem is that all applications today loads tons of dlls and potentially other stuff (like registry access) so your drive heads are almost guaranteed to have to move a longer distance than they would if you just put both on C unless C is very full and if C is very full, then you will over time end up with a very fragmented C instead which is not good either.

If the C is a bit larger, it will help keep your boot time down though as it keeps all the OS files needed during a boot in a limited area at start of the disk even after you install ServicePack ZYX which replaces half the files in the OS, but for application loading, it will probably not help at all.

That said, if this is a large drive like a 1.5TB, then that 60GB partition is just 4% of the total stroke length of the heads and the "extra" distance the head has to travel is so small that this just ends up being theoretical mumbo jumbo with no practical importance anyway :)

Putting your data on a different partition might be a good practice in general though, but probably not from a performance viewpoint. Makes it easier to wipe OS and application as well as backing things up.

Drives are so cheap these days that I put my personal data on a dedicated raid 1.

Terje
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Post by Terje » Sat Aug 01, 2009 8:06 pm

sandy keelow wrote:
Havoc wrote:A related question:
If I use the standard partitioning tools in XP/Vista/Win7 am I guaranteed that the first partition is the furtherest out on the drive and the last partition furtherest in?
I think all partitioning tools start at sector adress 0, then there are probably some exotic drives where sector 0 is on the innermost cylinder but on all drives I've ever had sector 0 has always been on the outermost cylinder... I can confirm at least that with W98/2000/XP and a "normal" HDD the answer to your question is yes.
I have seen a lot of drives over the last 20 years and I have never seen one that starts on the inside, but yes, in theory it could probably happen.

There is one little detail on that "guarantee" part and that is the fact that drives might do bad block remapping or have certain bad blocks mapped out from the start.

Roll back 20 years, and server drives sometimes came new with a hand written table on them showing what bad block was on the drive and had been remapped (yes, 5 1/4" drives had a lot more space for writing :))

This is all so exotic that it hardly matters here anyway and you cannot really do much about it anyway, but I just brought it up as a curiosity that while you most likely get the partition at the start of the disk, you are not guaranteed that all the blocks in the partition is at the start of the disk.

Terje
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Post by Terje » Sat Aug 01, 2009 8:19 pm

plympton wrote:
chahahc wrote:Wow....That is impressive. But I don't really get how downsizing the drive increases performance.... :?

Wonder if there would be even more of a performance boost if it was downsized more....150gb or even 100gb for example.... :D
Or what's the "breakeven" size - Can you get 500 GB and EQUAL a Velociraptor? 800 GB? I wonder how it picks it's cylinders that it uses? Does it prefer a single platter (doubt it), or start from the middle and work it's way out of all platters equally?

-Dan
Cylinders, heads, etc. does not really matter anymore and there is no real mapping from those settings in the OS/bios to physical layout on the disk.

Disk geometries lost their usefulness as drives stopped having a fixed number of blocks per cylinder (in the old days, cylinder 0 had the same number of blocks as the last cylinder on the drive). There is no easy way anymore for the OS to say that block X is in cylinder Y since each cylinder on a modern drive has different number of blocks.

Regardless of the physical layout of the drive is, OS and filesystem will assume that block 6 is close to block 5 for performance reasons, which essentially means that they have to be on the same or adjacent cylinders.

5 cannot be at the end of one platter while 6 is at the beginning of another platter. That would kill performance in general.

So, bottom line is just that you cap the drive off after the first X blocks (or Bytes) the actual geometry parameters resulting from this is all dealt with internally in the drive.

Terje
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Post by Terje » Sat Aug 01, 2009 8:28 pm

dhanson865 wrote:1. Partitioning is much simpler to do

2. What is up with the Seagate 7200.11 love from this guy? You could do the same short stroking by one or more methods with a Samsung HD502HI or Western Digital WD6400AAKS. There is no magic to buying the specific model or brand he mentioned or magic to buying any drive I mentioned. Buy a drive format it for less than the full capacity and enjoy the speed benefit.
He probably selected that drive since it is the only 7200 rpm 1.5TB drive for sale right now (at least the only one listed on newegg, the others are slower 5400 rpm drives)

Given the same data density (or rather, same capacity per platter, and I think both the 1.5TB seagate and the 640 runs ~330GB platters), short stroking a 640GB drive to 300GB would just cut the head movement in half.

Short stroking a 1.5GB drive to 300 GB cuts head movement to 1/5th.

That should make a very noticeable difference on access time (and better throughput across the 300Gb partition of course)
Last edited by Terje on Sat Aug 01, 2009 11:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Terje
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Post by Terje » Sat Aug 01, 2009 9:40 pm

Yep, short stroking has value. It decreases stroke length and keeps the data on the part of the drive with the highest throughput.

It does not really make your drive faster, it just makes sure that it does not get slow.

This is an old trick. I was told back in the early 90s that the enormously huge TPC benchmarks done on big iron setups back then with hundreds of drive often used just the 5-10% outer cylinders of the drives to keep performance optimal and the technique is of course much older than that.

When Seagate introduced their fairly small but very expensive Cheetah X15 (worlds first 15k rpm drive), short stroking was actually part of their defense for the entire product.

http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/ST318451LW
---
Through interviews with many of its top customers, the company found that its drives were being used with partitions that spanned only one-half or even one-third of total capacity. The reason? Clients wanted to improve on drive seek times by restricting seeks to only a fraction of the platter's span.
---

Nothing new here, the price/performance ratio between the different drives has obviously had the short stroking factor calculated in by vendors since long before "short stroking" got re-discovered by PC geeks.

I personally think that most of this is just a curiosity except for benchmarking competitions or where you really focus on getting the absolutely last little permille out of your computer just so you can laugh at the kid next door since your computer is faster than his or feel good because the next level of crysis loads 5 seconds faster (which I think might very well be a very valid reason :))

Most modern filesystems will in various ways try to group data together on the disk to reduce latency. This does not always mean that it groups all of it together at the start of the drive, but if you look at the "grandfather" of modern filesystems, the berkley fast file system, it will try to, for instance, group files in one directory close together as it will assume that they often related and more importantly, if you work in one directory, you might need to access all the files in it because you list the directory, search in it, etc.

If you have a very large drive like a 1.5TB disk and use only 100 GB of it, well I have to admit that I have never actually scanned such a disk under windows and looked at how things get allocated in detail ntfs, but I would suspect that most of the data gets allocated mainly in 2-3 areas of the drive and probably most, if not all, of that ends up somewhere in the first 50% of the drive.

Yes, short stroking give you some level of guarantee on your minimum performance, but in reality, if you only use a small part of the drive anyway, you will probably see a lot of the same advantage even if you do not partition or in other ways cut of the total disk size and you get the additional bonus of larger contiguous segments of free space which reduces filesystem fragmentation in general.

Bottom line, this is fun for benchmarks and might be critical for applications with certain real time like performance requirements, but most likely a curiosity for most other uses.

When that is said, I am kind of feeling like heading out to get a 1.5TB drive just to run my own test on it as well as finding out if the shorter arm movements affect noise :)

Cryoburner
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Post by Cryoburner » Sun Aug 02, 2009 7:38 pm

Did you just make like 5 massive posts in a row? : )
Terje wrote:
Wibla wrote:This isnt exactly news...

I partitioned the system drive in my P182 (Samsung F1 640GB) for speed myself, using this setup:

C: - boot/system - 60 GB
F: - games - 100GB
G: - backups/images - 426GB

This works great for me, as I seldom access the images, and both games and system files are solidly inside the 100+MB/s "band" on the drive.
Merge C and F.
The problem with multiple partitions in terms of performance is that they _force_ the drive heads to move a certain minimum distance even if you only use a little bit of each partition.
Except Wibla's F: partition is for games, not applications. Games generally load all the DLLs and other system files they need at startup, which usually only takes a matter of seconds. After that, they mostly just load their own resource files, like 3D models, sounds, and textures. This either happens during relatively long loads before the start of a level, or in short bursts while the game is playing. Either way, they don't spend much time constantly alternating back and forth between the resource and system files.

An advantage of keeping games separate from your OS and applications is that you can guarantee they won't be taking up space near the very beginning of your disk, potentially spacing out the distance between OS files and applications, making overall system responsiveness a slower for common desktop tasks. Modern games can utilize massive resource files, and some can even consume over 10GB installed. I'd rather not have those mixed between my applications and drivers.

Another advantage to giving them their own partitions is that it can speed up processes like virus scans and disk defragmentation, by not having to perform those tasks on files that don't need to be checked. Why wait hours for your virus scanner to make its way through all your game resource files when they are unlikely to contain malware? With games on their own partition, you can keep the size of your system partition lean, making it easier to perform a thorough scan more often. You can also set processes like system restore to only be enabled on your Windows partition, and not waste drive space or other resources backing up unimportant game files.

I actually do keep most of my applications on a separate partition as well, but as mentioned in my prior post, they're still within the first 10% of disk space, so seeks between them and system files shouldn't be bad at all. I do keep some smaller programs on the system partition that are likely to access it often, like web browsers, but most other less system related applications go on their own partition nearby.

I'll likely use a fast SSD in my next desktop, so things should be different then. All application and OS files will go on there, and depending on the size, I might keep some games on it as well. Most games that don't benefit much from the increased performance will probably remain on a traditional hard drive though, since I'll have one installed for data and backups anyway.

Terje
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Post by Terje » Sun Aug 02, 2009 8:00 pm

Cryoburner wrote:Did you just make like 5 massive posts in a row? : )
Indeed. Was bored of other things and storagesystem is like an old fetish for me :)
[/quote]
Cryoburner wrote: Except Wibla's F: partition is for games, not applications. Games generally load all the DLLs and other system files they need at startup, which usually only takes a matter of seconds.
While I agree on the fact that most of the game stuff today is large resource files, graphics, videos, whatever, you cannot really assume that your DLLs are all loaded at startup.

Binaries and libraries are demand loaded in practically every mainstream OS I can think of today.

That is, you do not load an entire DLL (or the application binary for that matter), the OS will map it into virtual memory and when the application actually tries to access those parts of memory, it will trigger a page fault and the VM will read those specific pages from disk and into memory.

Once in memory, there is no guarantee that it will stay there either. If you have noticeable memory pressure (and this memory pressure might not be just due to other applications memory space, it might also be due to high disk utilization which causes the filesystem cache to grow), the OS will potentially discard read only memory segments (code and text) from binaries and later page them in again as needed from disk.

Of course, as memory is getting dirt cheap and we all will have 12+GB memory soon enough, you will probably have all the DLL and OS files in cache most of the time anyway, but until then, I am not so sure partitions is the way to go here.

Traciatim
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Post by Traciatim » Sun Sep 13, 2009 6:32 pm

Terje, this is exactly the reason that I use Ultimate Defrag (free edition) to put my drives in order. It's much easier than partitioning, since you never have to worry about space considerations. You just add more directories in the order that you want them in to your defrag pattern and voila, short stroking, and data storage all on one drive letter.

I wonder if I should compare short stroking a drive to ultimate defrag in real world scenarios. I don't think I have a clean drive to try it on, maybe someone out there does that could give it a whirl.

agaver
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Post by agaver » Fri May 14, 2010 5:14 am

Hello people...

After reading throughout the 3 pages of this thread... I learnt about croatian economy, australians eating habits... someone catching up with snakes and polar bears and I even learnt about the poor's kangaroos fate... wich is everything very very informative and interesting ...but I'm still wondering... with todays hd prices... specifically the new samsung f3 hd502hj (500gb) which are under 50$ in the USA... has anyone trying actually short stroking on raid 0 two of these drives in real life?
Also I got a bit confused about the partition thing.. I have a 1tb hitachi hd... and I partitioned it like this:
c - 100gb - os / swap file / program files
d - 900gb - video / music / docs / whatever is left...
if I understood correctly my os and swap files should be at the beginning of the disk (whatever that means) ... but where is the beginning of the disk? I mean the hd I believe has 3 platters.. with some 300 and some GB per platter.. so which platter is number 1? where are actually those 100gb "placed" on my hard drive? I'm using mydefrag to defrag the hd.. but it shows me nothing about where actually my information is written on the hard drive... is there any tool, application that will actually show me exactly where my information is on the hd? something with graphics will be more clear to assimilate.. example... the swap file is being store on the platter number 1 on the first inch of the outter area of the drive?
I know ssd is better and velociraptors are better and yea with short stroking I will be wasting space... I've read all that... now my point is... for 100$ you can have two short stroke drives in raid 0 that could really actually improved my pc desktop experience? browsing, boot times, video edition? I really don't care about the wasted space if it really gives me a performance boost for the buck.... since I could use my 1tb drive for storage purposes... do I have a point? and since the f3 are 1 single platter... I hope the very first 100gb should be on the outter side of the disk... plus 1 platter = less heat / noise...
Hope I'm explaining myself good enough... and hey you australians stop eating kangaroos... otherwise they will become extinct like the australian polar bears ;)
thanks

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Fri May 14, 2010 7:11 am

Beginning of the disk is the first part of the first partition. Platters has nothing to do with it. The beginning of the disk is near the outer edge, on all the platters.

You should have the swap file on the C partition (assuming that C is first on the disk, which it usually is unless you have partitioned the drive in a funny way).
Of course if you have enough RAM you could disable the swap file. I always do that but some people advise against it.

I would also get an SSD, instead of messing around with short stroked HDDs in a RAID configuration. That sounds like a lot of hassle (and noise). Isn't the 40GB Intel around 100$?

agaver
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Post by agaver » Fri May 14, 2010 8:57 am

Vicotnik wrote:Beginning of the disk is the first part of the first partition. Platters has nothing to do with it. The beginning of the disk is near the outer edge, on all the platters.
I'm sorry but beginning of the disk is the first part of the first partition.. not quite satisfies me, specially on multi-platters hard drives... the information is translated to bits then into magnetic field or signatures and that magnetic "thing" is placed somewhere in one of those platters.. right? so the way I see it performance should be affected by the platters shape and quantity... Now.. any tool that will actually show u that ur data is phisically placed there? I mean something that will tell u this magnetic value / field that correspond to your file "whatever.exe" is phisically located on platter number at location number xx and that is at xx from the center of the platter?
Vicotnik wrote:You should have the swap file on the C partition (assuming that C is first on the disk, which it usually is unless you have partitioned the drive in a funny way).
I do.
Vicotnik wrote:I would also get an SSD, instead of messing around with short stroked HDDs in a RAID configuration. That sounds like a lot of hassle (and noise). Isn't the 40GB Intel around 100$?
any ssd in particular u recommend for value / performance? any review website u could point me at?
Thanks a lot!

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Fri May 14, 2010 2:22 pm

I would recommend reading the 'Hard Disk Drive Reference Guide' on StorageReview.com. That should answer most of your questions.
- http://www.storagereview.com/hard_disk_ ... ence_guide

Reviews of SSDs are all over the place. Intel have a few very popular SSDs. Check out the major hardware sites like Anandtech.com, StorageReview.com etc.

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