Seagate 7200.7
Just picked up a shiny new Seagate 7200.7 160GB drive. I had my two tiny 36G raptors filled up for too long, and was sick of using my array for storage and OS/Apps. Started moving over a lot of my 'archived' items, and my performance has increased quite a bit.
These Seagate drives feel very quick, and I took a quick ATTO. The lower end of the ATTO seems pretty fantastic. The low-end reads are actually better than my pair of raptors in Raid-0. And this is not even with an empty drive either.
This drive supports NCQ, but I'm not sure how to tell if it is even enabled, does anyone have any suggestions?
These Seagate drives feel very quick, and I took a quick ATTO. The lower end of the ATTO seems pretty fantastic. The low-end reads are actually better than my pair of raptors in Raid-0. And this is not even with an empty drive either.
This drive supports NCQ, but I'm not sure how to tell if it is even enabled, does anyone have any suggestions?
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The atto's do not look bad for that drive?? They are nice and usually very quiet drives but not speed demons. Depending on how full they are that ATTO looks good to go!
Software raid pays a serious price usually on the low end of atto with the overhead of software raid. And all onboard raid is just software raid really. Glorified IDE controllers with neat drivers. They use the computers cpu and memory to handle the striping so they are NOT hardware raid.
Thats why I keep preaching that for many things ide raid is not faster then non raided drives really. You need long sequential reads to get any REAL WORLD benefit from ide raid. The access time usually goes up not down like a true hardware raid controller. Long sequential reads/writes benefit but most normal disk acesses suffer.
balancing the I-O manually across both chanels will give more performance in the majority (not all) cases.
Tex
My NF4 controller does support NCQ, as does the drive, so I assume it should be operating using NCQ, but just wanted to be sure. I doubt NCQ would matter much in my case, as it's just being used for storage.
Very quiet drives indeed! I can not hear it whatsoever over my rad fans, even when it is in action. Not too bad for $109 cdn I think.
I know what you mean, if you take a look at some of the old IDE controllers, like the highpoint IDE on the old Abit BP6 boards. All it took was a firmware hack to enable 'so-called' hardware raid. Clearly those chips were leaving a lot up to the CPU for processing. Some of the old promise IDE cards could do similar tricks.
Although the raid on my board is certainly not true hardware raid with a dedicated risc processor, and dedicated cache, the 'chipset' based raid seems to be a step in the right direction. Performance is greatly improved over many of the mainstream controllers (like the SiI 3112 etc). It's not limited by the PCI bus, and reduces CPU overhead considerably. Moving from my SiI controller on my old asus board to the NF3/NF4 onchip raid controllers yeilded me over 15,000 higher top-end scores in atto, and a better bottom end as well.
Tex