AZpedr Posted February 21, 2008 Share Posted February 21, 2008 So I just successfully installed Leopard using the Kalyway DVD, and everything seemed to be working fine (after a few patches) until I started running Xbench tests. I have a GA-P35-DS4 rev2.1 mobo w/ the E6850 C2D, 2GB 800Mhz RAM, an Asus silent 7300GT and two SATA hard drives... both of which are producing very low numbers on the XBench disk test. One is a 500GB Western Digital and the other is a 160GB Hitachi. My computer seems to especially suck at the random 4k uncached read & write... I've attached a screenshot but in case you can't see it I've already applied the hard drive fix (to make them all show up as internal). It did not have any effect on the score... My BIOS settings are the exact same as the ones in the P35-DS4 install guide thread in this forum... which makes me wonder if it would perform better with a RAID setup instead of AHCI..? I'll keep playing around with it... but in the meantime is there anyone else here who has encountered this problem? Is there a simple answer that I'm missing..? Thanks in advance.... -T Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AZpedr Posted February 21, 2008 Author Share Posted February 21, 2008 bump Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
QuietOC Posted February 22, 2008 Share Posted February 22, 2008 My computer seems to especially suck at the random 4k uncached read & write... Mechanical hard drives do suck at small random reads and writes. That's why they have caches. Year old 250GB Seagate Barracuda pulled from my iMac (=fragmented): Drive Type ST3250824AS Q Disk Test 35.16 Uncached Write 7.23 0.77 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 61.43 0.44 MB/sec [4K blocks] Same drive erased and restored (=unfragmented): Disk Test 42.90 Uncached Write 8.43 0.89 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 84.95 0.60 MB/sec [4K blocks] Compared to an old WD2500KS with the same data: Drive Type WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0 Disk Test 51.71 Uncached Write 13.51 1.43 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 83.26 0.59 MB/sec [4K blocks] My BIOS settings are the exact same as the ones in the P35-DS4 install guide thread in this forum... which makes me wonder if it would perform better with a RAID setup instead of AHCI..? RAID only helps large continuous tranfers, it actually slows down typical random access. AHCI has NCQ enabled which will also slightly slows down random access (but is great for server usage patterns). For best desktop drive performance you would want to disable NCQ, which means "IDE" mode, if your BIOS gives you that choice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtotho Posted February 22, 2008 Share Posted February 22, 2008 Here are my Western digital raptor 10k results Disk Test 78.39 Sequential 158.74 Uncached Write 159.82 98.13 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 153.25 86.71 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 166.22 48.65 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 156.24 78.52 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 52.04 Uncached Write 17.07 1.81 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 189.26 60.59 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 128.80 0.91 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 191.60 35.55 MB/sec [256K blocks] Better, but you are not alone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schwinn555 Posted February 22, 2008 Share Posted February 22, 2008 Just installed a new Seagate 320GB Sata drive. Disk tests with X Bench 55 or so. My older Maxtor ide/ata tests @ 80 . Seagate forums have a bunch of people complaining about the current drives being slow. Seagate isn't saying much but have replaced some peoples drives. Replacement drives are just as slow . I got an amazing price on my drive $68.88 @ Fry's maybe because they are slow?? I wish it was faster but can live with it for the price and does have 5 year warranty. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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