What do your hard disks score on xbench?

[joaoferro37]

I am trying to use 8 or even 10 (using optical bay) to make a OS stripe drive for extremely fast scratch disk.

I can use the stardom pro drive for my mac pro.
This product takes 2 SSD or 2.5" sata drive in one mac pro drive bay.
Has built-in RAID 0 or RAID 1.

I am thinking if this can reach over 1GB per second!!!
Yes this will solve some problems for my clients who are in need of high speed.

 

[jethrodesign]

Hi, these are our results on our server. It's using an older Highpoint RR1820a setup with 3 Seagate 200GB drives (yeah, it's pretty old now) running a RAID 5.

Results 27.98
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.11 (8S169)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerMac3,1
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 0 MHz
Version 7455 (Apollo) v3.2
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 256K
L3 Cache 2048K
Bus Frequency 100 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV250
Drive Type RR182x RAID 5 Array

Disk Test 27.98
Sequential 84.41
Uncached Write 70.04 43.00 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 83.94 47.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 59.16 17.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 232.99 117.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 16.77
Uncached Write 5.06 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 43.48 13.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 95.89 0.68 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 134.97 25.04 MB/sec [256K blocks]

A) The drives are pretty full, but is this still a bit low for a RAID 5?

We're migrating our server to a G5 1.6Ghz machine. We'll probably still use the RR1820 as this machine has only standard PCI slots. Probably get WD RE3 drives.

B) Any better setup we should consider to get some better performance while still having security/redundancy as our #1 priority?

Considering the following:
- Simple RAID 1 using Apple software RAID
- RAID 10 with 4 drives using Highpoint controller
- RAID 5 with 3 or 4 drives using Highpoint controller (similar to what we have).

This server is almost entirely used for just serving files to client machines over gigabit ethernet. Never worked on directly.

 

[nanofrog]

I am trying to use 8 or even 10 (using optical bay) to make a OS stripe drive for extremely fast scratch disk.

I can use the stardom pro drive for my mac pro.
This product takes 2 SSD or 2.5" sata drive in one mac pro drive bay.
Has built-in RAID 0 or RAID 1.

I am thinking if this can reach over 1GB per second!!!
Yes this will solve some problems for my clients who are in need of high speed.

Unfortunately, that's not going to work. The Pro Drive isn't going to give you the necessary throughput, as it's 2x drives to a single SATA port. To do this, it uses a PM chip, which at best, usually gives 250MB/s. You'd need 500MB/s.

Stardom's spec of up to 300MB/s, is very misleading, as that's the single drive operation. (And SATA 3.0gB/S = 375MB/s BTW; divide 3000 by 8).

You can still do it though (still internal), but you'd need to take a different route.

Use a 4x 2.5" backplane unit (fits a single 5.25" bay) in the empty optical bay. Then use 2.5" to 3.5" adapters for the HDD bays (1 - 4). This keeps you at 1 SATA port per drive, which is what you need to get the throughput you want out of SSD's.

For the 2.5" to 3.5" adapters, there's two that will work.

• MaxUpgrades SSD/Velociraptor Mount (they have versions that fit '06 - '09 MP's; '09's are different than the others)

• There's another by IcyDock that will fit as well (fits the existing tray in the system, so works on all models as well, and it's less expensive as well)

This setup still gives you 8x SSD's, all with 1 port each. Any more though, and you'd have to pull the optical drive (place it in an external 5.25" enclosure), for access to that internal bay. Then you could add an additional 4, bringing the total to 12. You'd also need a different RAID card, and that would be the ARC-1680ix12 (or larger, as you can still add externally).

 

[joaoferro37]

I was thinking using Stardom Pro Drive and utilize its build-in RAID 0 then do OS stripe.
That means I can utilize 8 SSD.
It ain't gonna work?

 

[nanofrog]

I was thinking using Stardom Pro Drive and utilize its build-in RAID 0 then do OS stripe.
That means I can utilize 8 SSD.
It ain't gonna work?

Yes and No.

That is, the Pro Drive (sold by more than Stardom BTW), will allow you to run 8x drives in the HDD bays on the MP. So there's the Yes.

The No, however, is the fact that the RAID0 is achieved via a Port Multiplier chip, and it will throttle the throughput. Let's say it acts as most do, and gives a max throuput of 250MB/s. That's going to be for BOTH drives COMBINED, not each. It may be less. Maybe 1GB/s is possible, if you're lucky. But I do recall somewhere, the Pro Drive is more like 200MB/s, so not that high.

I wouldn't trust it, when there's other options. And better still, the methodology I described is cheaper than the Pro Drives (x4)

$60 + 4x $25 = $160USD Total. (all of it from newegg; icy dock adapter, 4x 2.5" backplane enclosure

So to get the max throughput, EACH SSD needs it's own SATA port (not shared).

 

[msmth928]

I have 2 500GB 16MB Cache Seagates that both average at around 85

Just a quick note to say I am now running SL and with a clean install put those two drives into Raid stripe. Xbench now gives me (3 goes..)

131
131
136

Not quite double the performance but still pretty neat

 

[justit]

I'm using Esperance DV 2.3.2 that I got from here: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16518

....

PS is still installed on it after several reboots and I was even able to shrink it's size down closer to PS's needs - which for me is 800MB.

As for the naysayers saying RAM Disks such as this aren't fast just look no further than the benchmark. How useful it is depends on you of course.

1151.59 Disk

@Tesselator This Ram Disk is set to 2GB. Are you suggesting to make only an 800MB ram disk? Isn't larger the better? I work with many small (200K) website images.

 

[zachsilvey]

I scored about 125 as an average of 3 runs on a Raid 5 configuration of 4x1tb hitachi deskstar 7200 rpm using Apple's raid card.

 

[youbetcharaid]

WOW, Stardom ST8-U5 800MB/s in RAID 5

http://silveradosys.blogspot.com/ Silverado tested this product & got some great real world speeds. & you can buy it at a great price too.

 

[oplix]

Momentus XT 500gb

37.09

pretty sure this drive is not fully compatible with xbench though. Score seems way too low. Seen people getting around 60 with PATA drives on this thread.