Very interesting Intel SRT Results

L

Lancer

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 2, 2005
Messages
324
So I was recently given an Intel 311 Larson Creek drive and I enabled SRT acceleration on my system. Performance wise I was blown away with my original HD configuration. Everything was considerably snappier. Even though I wasn't running a full SSD system, the load times were great and I wasn't having to compromise on space. So I figured if my old HD's were doing so good with SRT, some new flashier drives would as well. Below is my setup and the results

MB: Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z Z68
Proc: Intel Core i5 2500K (stock)
Memory: 8gb (2x4GB) Corsair XMS3 1600Mhz
GPU: 2x ATI 5850 reference (Crossfire)
SSD for SRT: Intell 311 20GB Larson Creek
OS: Windows 7 X64 Ultimate

HD Test 1
2x Hitachi Deskstar 500GB 16MB Cache 7200RPM Raid 0 Intel ICH10R
This is with no caching, just the Raid setup
6172153705_0b8390b386_o.jpg


Nothing special, not too bad for almost 6 year old drives.

HD Test 2
2x Hitachi Deskstar 500GB 16MB Cache 7200RPM Raid 0 Intel ICH10R w Intel 311 Cache Drive

This is with the cache drive set to Maximum

6172153789_54525b6661_o.jpg


Wow, the performance is amazing considering the age of the drives and just adding the simple cache drive.

HD Test 3
2x Western Digital 1TB Black FAEX 64MB Cache 7200RPM Raid 0 Intel ICH10R

This is with no caching, just the Raid setup
6172683050_74a803e36d_o.jpg


Seq Reads and writes are looking great, especially over the original RAID setup, should look really good when SRT is enabled.

HD Test 4
2x Western Digital 1TB Black FAEX 64MB Cache 7200RPM Raid 0 Intel ICH10R w Intel 311 Cache Drive

This is with the cache drive set to Maximum
6172153645_136d3bc9e0_o.jpg


This is where I start scratching my head. The areas that should see improvements due to the cache drive are up but Seq reads and writes took a dive, Seq writes took a huge dive. I haven't been able to nail this down but it was a bit of a shocker. Performance wise I see 0 difference from my aging Hitachi setup. Ideas anyone?
 
Yeah, I was checking out the big SRT thread and it looks like someone else took the same performance hit on writes. I was hoping for a better outcome but the bonus side of this is really you don't need to spend a ton of money to get good performance out of SRT.
 
So I have been happily running SRT since this thread, the performance ha been great. But last night I had a strange problem, Windows refused to boot. It would start then bluescreen and reboot. I couldn't read the bluescreen in time but figured it had to do with SRT. after trying the recovery console I couldn't do anything without the SRT drivers on a removable disk. I said forget it and decided to just deal with it this morning. Downloading the driers was taking awhile so I went into my raid controller to see what options I might have. In the accelleration section I saw that it said my drives were out of sync with the cache drive, but no red flags or warnings. It had an option to sync them so I did, after a minute it was done, rebooted and windows came right back up. So if you have a problem it might be worth a shot.
 
Interesting. I've been thinking about getting a SSD and using SRT on my DZ68 with a 1TB Black drive--but the older model with 32Mb cache. It sounds promising.
 
I wouldn't worry too much... Sequential writes are the least important spec of all for the vast majority of people/workloads. Could always get a faster SSD if you want, but I think that performance looks decent.
 
Agreed. I don't think any conventional benchmark would be able to properly demonstrate something like SRT working as intended.

Things like real world boot and application load timings done after the caching had some time to work itself in would be interesting however.
 
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