Re: Hard drive read speeds

Steven Kurylo wrote:
> On 2/26/07, Les Klassen Hamm <les@bitlink.ca> wrote:
>> Greetings all,
>>
>> Can someone point me to some good info on hard drive reading speeds?
>> More specifically, if software needs to do a great deal of reading from
>> lots of different files, how would a pair of 7200rpm drives in RAID 0
>> compare to one 10K rpm drive?
>
> I'm going to assuming you meant raid 1. As well relatively small random
> seeks.

I think I actually did mean raid 0, as I meant striped rather than
mirrored. But I think the data is probably LARGE seeks, but from many
different files, which may tip the scale heavily in favour of the 10K
drives. The primary application is autocad mechanical and/or the newer
Inventor, and loading massive drawings which read from several hundred
files when rendering.

 From your and Dave's replies, I'm leaning toward the 10K option, but I
haven't read the article Jason referenced yet.

> I would say any given single transaction will be faster on the single
> drive. However multiple transactions will be faster on the raid 1
> because the linux kernel can balance the requests across the drives.
>
> Of course it would be interesting to test.

Indeed, testing would be the key. What really gets me is that the
seller/creator of the software seems uninterested in answering this kind
of question. They point me to a hardware benchmark page, which doesn't
even list the hard drive specs for the tested system.

Thanks all for the help.

      Les...
Received on Tue Feb 27 07:40:43 2007