HD access speed

[Elf_Boy]

I just installed vista 64.. was finaly time to upgrade from 32. Drivers are available enough and stable eough for me now.

Though the process out of boredome whiel installing apps and service apcks I got to looking at my system information... noticed the HD speed on the resource monitor.

What would be a "good" speed? I know good is relative... But what would eb average, above average and OMG.

I know my SATA is in theory able to hit 300 or is that 150?... does the real world work that way? I saw mostly around 100 with spikes at 200 (was that chaching?).

When I was backing up, to a networked HD (time capsule via USB 2 port) I also saw pretty much 100 as the cap. The computer and capsule both do gigabit ethernet. Usb 2 is 480, right? Should I have had a higher number?

Not that it really matters, I am happy with system performance, plays wow just fine as well as COH, Oblivion and Bioshock.... anything I have given it to do really. I am just waiting for a raid to format right now. Which as I now look strangly has the monitor spiking at 350+ gigabits per second for disk access. I also understand built in windows tools may not be the most accurate.

If it matters,

amd 9600 (BE)
4 gigs
m2n 32 sli delux

 

[Mcot]

The SATA2 bus speed is 3 gigabits / second. The real world limit is around 300MB/s. Most hard drives operate lower than the 300MB/S so thats not your bottleneck.

USB is fast in bursts but on sustained transfers it tends to slow down to very low speeds. USB is your bottleneck. Also 480mbits/sec = 60MB/S. The MAXIMUM for USB is still far slower than standard hardrive speeds.

Gigabit ethernet should allow for transfers in the 100MB/S range, which is still much faster than sustained USB.

 

[Elf_Boy]

Thank you.

Why would a raid zero 2*300 on the nforce 590 set of 6 ports seem to be slower then a single 500 drive on the sil image 3132 single port sata?

I thought the whole point of striping was speed? Or is it more likely the drives themselves are just that much slower that even with striping they dont keep up?

 

[Syntax Error]

Thank you.

Why would a raid zero 2*300 on the nforce 590 set of 6 ports seem to be slower then a single 500 drive on the sil image 3132 single port sata?

I thought the whole point of striping was speed? Or is it more likely the drives themselves are just that much slower that even with striping they dont keep up?

RAID0 performance isn't 100% lineally scalable, there's a point of diminishing returns, much like SLI and Crossfire don't offer 100% performance boosts by adding a second GPU into the equation.

The bottleneck probably lies in controller inefficiencies, a slow drive in the array, or other factors (such as the interface used or the types of drives used), stripe size, whatever. There's a lot of variables towards what will eventually become "real world" performance with RAID, but one of the things I wouldn't stress too much about would be the bus speeds. SATA I 1.5Gbps is well over the maximum theoretical benchmark speeds of most hard drives. SATA II 3.0Gbps essentially does overkill (for now, at least) with 3Gbps of bandwidth, well over any current disk drive (even SSDs) can throw at it.