Hard drive read/write performance under expectations

[Solitas]

Hello!

Contextual information:
Trying to use FRAPS to record gaming sessions.

System:
Intel Core i7-2600
8GB RAM
Windows 7 x64
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
Crucial M4 -CT256 SSD
Western Digital WD6401AALS


Issue:
Read/Write speed to WD hard drive well below expectations. Throughput while FRAPS is running as measured by Windows Performance Monitor is ~42MB/s.

CrystalDiskMark benchmarking:
Sequential - 104.4 MB/s read, 101.9 MB/s write
512k Random - 36.2 MB/s read, 53.38 MB/s write

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to improve / fix the write speed?

Thanks so much!
Timothy

 

[Dereck47]

Maximum Read/Write speeds for the WD6401AALS is 126MB/s.
So you are getting 82.8% of maximum Reads and 80.8% of maximum Writes.

Hopefully other forum members will be able to resolve your issue, but don't expect more than 10-15% improvement in performance.

Here's a link to the spec sheet of the drive: http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/search/1/a_id/5387#

 

[fzabkar]

Your CrystalDiskMark result is consistent with a drive that has two 320GB platters.

http://www.abload.de/img/hdtunewx1o.png
http://public.dm1.livefilestore.com/y1pEz5Wbn8PeFnvNNDVhNAEYxPWOpviPLg5KeiQ7VtfkHF6nU3GknfRKuILx89-I_ZaBOE8zForaJ0GPZVacY-h_g/Benchmark%20WDC%20WD6401AALS-00L3B.png?rdrts=34400125
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/attachments/storage/3363d1226445771-640gb-western-digital-caviar-black-wd6401aals-hd-tune-result-hdtune_benchmark_wdc_wd6400aaks-07a7b.png
http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc109/e6600/hdtune.png

In fact you could have ended up with a 3-platter drive which would have been a lot slower:
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/6278/hdtunewd6401.png

The transfer rate of 126MB/s alluded to by Dereck47 corresponds to the transfer rate that one would expect of a drive with a data density of 500GB per platter. One way to achieve that would be with 2 short stroked 500GB platters and 3 heads, ie a short stroked 750GB drive.

 

[Solitas]

hmmm... worth it to record to my SSD you think? it'll fill up so fast though!

thanks much guys. i thought I read on the specsheet that the speeds were up in the 300MB/s range.

 

[Dereck47]

hmmm... worth it to record to my SSD you think? it'll fill up so fast though!

You can record to your SSD for faster write speeds and when you're done recording just cut & paste the file to your HDD to free up space on your SSD.

 

[Solitas]

You can record to your SSD for faster write speeds and when you're done recording just cut & paste the file to your HDD to free up space on your SSD.

Good thought. I'll give it a try - some of these files are going to be 70G, which is a good chunk of what I have left for free space, but I'll give it a shot and report back.

Thanks everyone!

 

[Dereck47]

Since you're going to be writing and deleting large chunks of data you should reboot and let your pc idle at the login screen overnight while you sleep once a week or so to allow TRIM and Garbage Collection maintain drive performance.

In Control Panel in Power Options set your drive to Never shut down so it doesn't sleep while your system is idle.