Have I short-stroked?

[Rob001]

I came across the practice of short-stroking last night and decided it would be a good thing to do on my overly-large 500GB HDD. I opened up partition magic, created a new partition after c-drive, and gave it 300+ GB. The HDD now looks like this in partition magic:

If I don't use H-drive, will this be an effective short-stroke. Or have I got the wrong idea, or done this wrong?

 

[OliverBGD]

Yes you did it right, and if you decrease the size of C drive from 100GB down to 50GB you will get an even better performance. Just make sure to not use C drive at teh same time as H drive or else you'll loose the benefits of short-stroking. So use your H drive only for storage and when you are not intesivly using the C drive.

If you have a raid controller that allows you to partition the drive it might be better because you'll be able to measure the benefits of short-stroking, since HD TUNE and ATTO won't be able to see the partitions that you create in Windows, instead it'll see and emasure teh whoel drive.

 

[Rob001]

Ah, glad i've done it right then. I'm not planning on using H at all, and will probably optimize the sizes of the partitions when i've got all my files in order. Then i'll just keep increasing the size of C when I need more space.

I dont have a RAID controller, but im personally not too fussed on benchmarking anyways. Im sure things will be more efficient this way.

Thanks for the help.

 

[chaikovski2002]

How much performance gain are we talking about here?

 

[Vix]

How much performance gain are we talking about here?

Not the greatest comparison because of differences in number of drives, configuration, etc., but this shows my 4 short stroked raptors (WBC enabled) vs. the generic benchie for 2 regular raptors.

 

[unhappy_mage]

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a11/utladyvixen/ssraptors.jpg[IMG][/QUOTE]

That's a pretty decent result: 6.9ms seek times instead of 8.6ms. What configuration did you have to do to get the disk to be only a fraction of the full size? How does it perform in real-world tests?

 

[Vix]

Results vary depending on the benchmarking program used. I have my 4 raptors setup:

1) Primary RAID0 partition of 80 GB. That short strokes the array for speed. 64k stripe.
2) Secondary RAID5 partition with the remainder of the drive space. Gives me some decent storage with redundancy.
3) Write Back Cache enabled in the Intel Matrix console.

Real world performance wise, this is the snappiest machine I've ever had. Opens programs lightning fast, XP Pro loads in under 8 seconds, and many games seem to load in a fraction of the time they used to. I get the performance boost for my OS and programs, and a decent backup solution. Info on the RAID5 array is automaticallly backed up to the SCSI RAID array on my home server weekly for further data security.

This is the HD Tune results I get on this array: