ServeTheHome.com

After reviewing the Hitachi 5K3000 2TB SilentSpin drive earlier this year, questions have steadily trickled in around the 3TB version. One thing that was consistent in comments was a perception that the Hitachi 5K3000 3TB drive runs slower than the 2TB version. Today we look at the 3TB model’s benchmarks to see what kind of performance the drive offers. Read the full story

With the sheer number of CPUs and platforms I test for ServeTheHome.com I have been keeping my own records on performance and scaling. Various benchmarks yield very different results under Windows and Linux, but also yield different scaling based on core counts and clock speed. It turns out that Stanford’s Folding@Home client, when proper optimizations have been applied, can scale very well with increased cores and clock speed. With Windows installations, CPU scaling is unpredictable to a point. On Linux installations, with proper thread to core affinity settings, scaling is very close to linear. Moving from 2P dodeca (twelve) core Opteron 6100 series CPUs to quad dodeca core Opteron 6100 series CPUs has yielded approximately 97% scaling. This ~97% scaling also works with clock speeds. After finding this scaling factor, it became obvious that the community needed not just a standardized benchmark, but also a standardized way of reporting results. User self-reporting has been tried in the past, but it is too sporadic and too prone to error to use on a large scale. Read the full story

Hitachi’s 7K2000 drives were a favorite among users with large small business and home storage systems because the drives worked well with many RAID cards. A few drawbacks of those drives were that they were not the fastest 7,200rpm drives around, they were not the coolest running, nor the quietest. With its 3TB lineup, Hitachi introduced not just the 7,200rpm successor to the 7K2000 series, the 7K3000 series, but also a “green” drive alternative, the 5K3000 series. Retail availability is still not the best as the drives are just becoming available at major retailers and etailers. Read the full story

I got a note asking to update my original benchmark for the Patriot PS-100 32GB with results from the new Patriot PS-100 Firmware v2.008. Performance is said to be better and it is!

Update 6 June 2010: New Patriot PS-100 32GB Firmware v3.000 benchmarks are up.

The specs of the update are:

Firmware update #2.008

• Firmware v2.006 doesn’t support Active Protection feature in Lenovo laptops. Firmware 2.008 fixed it by enabling Active Protection identify bit.
• Some platforms had issue installing Windows 7 into SSD with firmware v2.006. The root cause is partial command will be NAK in background process and bank (0) is not loaded in PRAM. Firmware v2.008 has fixed this issue.
• Firmware v2.006 has power on and loading Windows XP issue with some NVIDIA chipsets. Firmware v2.008 fixed it by changing default setting to MDMA mode 2.
• In Apple Mac Book and Mac Book Pro, sometimes SSD with Firmware v2.006 will fail in reboot. Firmware v2.008 fixed this issue.

Quick Teaser: The results got better!

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Shortly after posting my last benchmarks on the dual OCZ Vertex 120GB in Raid 0 setup, I received an e-mail to try the new Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 9.6.0.1014 drivers, which were supposed to enable TRIM in raid. These new drivers were released, taken down, then re-released in March 2010. The big improvement was supposed to be TRIM is enabled for Raid 0, 1, 10, but not enabled for Raid 5. Unfortuneately, this seems not to be working so the best that can be done is the background garbage collection in firmware v1.5 for OCZ’s Indilinx based SSDs. Since I am only working with two 120GB drives at the moment, I decided to give them a shot. Just for reference, the original benchmarks were done with the standard, off the shelf, Windows 7 64-bit RTM drivers.

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Intel’s Clarkdale and H55/ H57 platforms are quite intriguing for several reasons. First, the performance is fairly good starting at 2.93ghz, and with hyperthreading, it is possible to get closer to a quad core performance in some tasks where multiple cores do well, such as video encoding. A second aspect is that Intel moved the IGP to an on package solution and really cut the power consumption/ heat dissipation of the platform. Finally, the cost of an i3-530 or i5-650 CPU plus a motherboard is often in the $200 or less range, making them quite affordable.

Two great uses for the chips are home servers and HTPC’s. Low power consumption and low heat generation ultimately enable lower acoustic signatures, as well as lower TCO through lower electric draw.

Core i5-650, Gigabyte H55M-UD2H, Dual Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI NICs

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