[Eugene]

One of StorageReview's hallmarks has been our consistent testbeds that enable direct comparison of a wide variety of drives, not just those found within a given review. Our third-generation Testbed has carried us for more than 3.5 years. Testbed4's era now dawns. The hardware has been updated. Software has been revised. Temperature assessment has been overhauled. There are winners and there are losers. Join us as we take a look at SR's updated hard drive test suite and see how your favorite disk stacks up!

Testbed4 Overview

[qzm]

I find it a little unfortunate that no testing is done on more 'typical' machines, primarily for the office use type measurements. I think everyone would be very surprised to find someone running office apps on a machine like this.

A much more typical 'fast' office machine would be at best perhaps a 955x motherboard running the standard ATA/sATA interfaces, and since PIIX controllers are what control a majority of all the worlds IDE drives it would have been nice to see figures on them.

The degree of change in some of these drives is to say the least interesting, perhaps indicating that the particular choice of hardware is having a notable effect on the outcomes, therefore indicating that some thought should be put into what type of hardware is used to test which benchmark.

[Theis]

Hi Eugene

First off, great article I've been looking forward to it.

Question:
Could you post the queue depth distribution for the game benchmarks ?

Best Regards

Theis

[Olaf van der Spek]

Quote

These three drives, however, remain constrained to their initial single-I/O score straight through a load of 32 outsanding operations. It is only the significantly heavier 64 and 128 queue depths that permit these drives an increase in I/Os per second delivered.

Does anyone know the cause for this?

[Eugene]

Olaf van der Spek, on Oct 13 2005, 09:02 AM, said:

Quote

These three drives, however, remain constrained to their initial single-I/O score straight through a load of 32 outsanding operations. It is only the significantly heavier 64 and 128 queue depths that permit these drives an increase in I/Os per second delivered.

Does anyone know the cause for this?

It's an artifact of the SI3124 driver.

[continuum]

Given the requirements of SR's Testbed4 for SCSI and SAS support, the choice of workstation-class hardware was well known. With dual core on the desktop, dual Xeons are more alike to their desktop companions than before...

[Eugene]

qzm, on Oct 12 2005, 04:11 PM, said:

I find it a little unfortunate that no testing is done on more 'typical' machines, primarily for the office use type measurements. I think everyone would be very surprised to find someone running office apps on a machine like this.

This way discussed here way back when we were mulling over the initial hardware.

The principal requirements (because we're going to expand significantly into multi-drive arrays) were PCI-X, PCIe (>1x), and an NCQ-capable SATA controller built in to the southbridge.

Satisfying all three requirements (at least back then) with a single board was impossible. Hence, we chose to emphasize the first two. Few consumer boards come with PCI-X. As a result, we found ourselves with the xeon mobo. Anyway, check out that thread for more detail.

[ehurtley]

qzm, on Oct 12 2005, 12:11 PM, said:

I find it a little unfortunate that no testing is done on more 'typical' machines, primarily for the office use type measurements. I think everyone would be very surprised to find someone running office apps on a machine like this.

A much more typical 'fast' office machine would be at best perhaps a 955x motherboard running the standard ATA/sATA interfaces, and since PIIX controllers are what control a majority of all the worlds IDE drives it would have been nice to see figures on them.

The degree of change in some of these drives is to say the least interesting, perhaps indicating that the particular choice of hardware is having a notable effect on the outcomes, therefore indicating that some thought should be put into what type of hardware is used to test which benchmark.

In short: The benchmarks aren't "bootup takes 30 seconds, loading a level in FarCry takes 10 seconds, loading a Word document takes 2 seconds"... They're numbers that are used to compare one drive to another.

Yes, having only 256MB of memory will limit the overall speed of your computer; as will having a single-core, single-threaded 2.4GHz Celeron. And changing your video card will affect gaming performance significantly. But none of this matters in a hard drive review that produces 'abstract' scores.

What this new testing does is exaggerate the differences between drives. Much like the U.S. EPA's fuel economy tests. (There's a reason it says 'these numbers are for comparison only' on car window stickers.) They're meant so you know how all other things being equal, one drive compares to another. If a Western Digital drive scores higher in the Desktop test than a Maxtor drive; then regardless of what computer you put it in, the Western Digital should be faster.

If you want 'pure' measurements, then just go by the drive seek times and max data transfer rates. They don't mean squat in terms of real-world performance, but they're nice hard numbers for you.

P.S. Thanks Eugene, we FINALLY have new content! I was beginning to get worried. Hopefully we'll see drive reviews start pouring out now.

[Eugene]

ehurtley, on Oct 17 2005, 05:58 PM, said:

P.S. Thanks Eugene, we FINALLY have new content!  I was beginning to get worried.  Hopefully we'll see drive reviews start pouring out now.

At least one a week

[ehurtley]

Eugene, on Oct 17 2005, 02:05 PM, said:

ehurtley, on Oct 17 2005, 05:58 PM, said:

P.S. Thanks Eugene, we FINALLY have new content!  I was beginning to get worried.  Hopefully we'll see drive reviews start pouring out now.

At least one a week

HALLELUJAH!!!