Need for speed SATA Hard drives and controller for development?
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It has recently come to my attention that my motherboards built in Nvidia SATA controller is crap and the SATA drives I have are the older SATA 1.5gbs spec. It has also come to my attention that on my quad core ram loaded system the disk is the bottleneck performance wise. Now that I'm working in a virtual machine exclusively I'm looking for top hard drive performance not only for working in the virtual machine but copying the virtual machine files back and forth between my boot drive and my virtual machine drive when I'm doing a "backup". I have a boot drive and a drive to contain the virtual machine "drives" and want to continue with this setup. For the hard drives I'm fairly certain the Velociraptors from Western Digital are the way to go barring anyone telling me differently but for the SATA controller(s) I'm a bit stumped. Should I use two separate controllers (space is getting tight, could be a problem) or is a single controller just as efficient for a two hard drive scenario? From what I can determine RAID 0 is not worth the expense for the miniscule performance gain and since I'm working virtual any raid system isn't really worth it, I can be back up and running in minutes if the hard drives pack it in. Any particular models or brands of controller I should look at? Is it likely I'll need different cables than the ones I'm using now for my old spec sata drives to go between the drive and the controller?
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
I have never seen a VM (well except a VPS with openvz and linux guest on linux host) that had good disk performance. What I generally see is a VM will take your 100+ MB/s 7200 RPM drive down to 60MB/s 5400 RPM laptop drive speed or basically equivalent to a 5 year old IDE 7200 RPM desktop drive performance. As far as tuning your system, one problem may be that your SATA controller is hung off the PCI bus. Some of today's single hard drives will require more bandwidth than PCI can deliver. One such drive is the 1.5TB seagate drive. The media read rate is 120MB/s in the outer tracks. A PCI controller will not be fast enough to keep up with that. Also if you have a second drive on any of the ports both drives will be competing for bandwidth.
John
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I have never seen a VM (well except a VPS with openvz and linux guest on linux host) that had good disk performance. What I generally see is a VM will take your 100+ MB/s 7200 RPM drive down to 60MB/s 5400 RPM laptop drive speed or basically equivalent to a 5 year old IDE 7200 RPM desktop drive performance. As far as tuning your system, one problem may be that your SATA controller is hung off the PCI bus. Some of today's single hard drives will require more bandwidth than PCI can deliver. One such drive is the 1.5TB seagate drive. The media read rate is 120MB/s in the outer tracks. A PCI controller will not be fast enough to keep up with that. Also if you have a second drive on any of the ports both drives will be competing for bandwidth.
John
John M. Drescher wrote:
one problem may be that your SATA controller is hung off the PCI bus
Hmmm...hardware is not really my thing these days when it gets down to the motherboard level. Looking at the specs for my motherboard[^] it appears to have two SATA controllers which seems odd:
NVIDIA® nForce4 SLI supports NVRAID
- 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33
- 4 x Serial ATA 3 Gb/s
- NVRAID: RAID0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD on Serial ATA drives
Silicon Image® 3132 SATA controller supports - 1 x Internal Serial ATA 3 Gb/s hard disk
- 1 x External Serial ATA hard disk (SATA On-the-Go)
- RAID 0, 1
Now I'm confused why there would be two controllers on the same motherboard, but they are integrated and I'm pretty sure I'm using the Nvidia one since I've seen no "silicon image" drivers anywhere. Perhaps my problem is simply the older drives themselves maybe the controller isn't as crappy as I think it is?
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
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John M. Drescher wrote:
one problem may be that your SATA controller is hung off the PCI bus
Hmmm...hardware is not really my thing these days when it gets down to the motherboard level. Looking at the specs for my motherboard[^] it appears to have two SATA controllers which seems odd:
NVIDIA® nForce4 SLI supports NVRAID
- 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33
- 4 x Serial ATA 3 Gb/s
- NVRAID: RAID0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD on Serial ATA drives
Silicon Image® 3132 SATA controller supports - 1 x Internal Serial ATA 3 Gb/s hard disk
- 1 x External Serial ATA hard disk (SATA On-the-Go)
- RAID 0, 1
Now I'm confused why there would be two controllers on the same motherboard, but they are integrated and I'm pretty sure I'm using the Nvidia one since I've seen no "silicon image" drivers anywhere. Perhaps my problem is simply the older drives themselves maybe the controller isn't as crappy as I think it is?
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
I will try to get back to you on this. Very busy at the day job.
John
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John M. Drescher wrote:
one problem may be that your SATA controller is hung off the PCI bus
Hmmm...hardware is not really my thing these days when it gets down to the motherboard level. Looking at the specs for my motherboard[^] it appears to have two SATA controllers which seems odd:
NVIDIA® nForce4 SLI supports NVRAID
- 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33
- 4 x Serial ATA 3 Gb/s
- NVRAID: RAID0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD on Serial ATA drives
Silicon Image® 3132 SATA controller supports - 1 x Internal Serial ATA 3 Gb/s hard disk
- 1 x External Serial ATA hard disk (SATA On-the-Go)
- RAID 0, 1
Now I'm confused why there would be two controllers on the same motherboard, but they are integrated and I'm pretty sure I'm using the Nvidia one since I've seen no "silicon image" drivers anywhere. Perhaps my problem is simply the older drives themselves maybe the controller isn't as crappy as I think it is?
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
More ports. The nVidia (or intel) has the number of ports capped by the chipset, adding more requires adding an additional controller. (The big one for intel chipsets is that they dropped pata a few years ago). Silicon image was a big name in onboard raid a few years ago, not sure what their current share is. In general though, performance differences are very minimal (a few percent) between chipset and onboard addon controllers. To see a real difference you'd need a pciE hardware raid card that costs a few hundred bucks. If you don't need the extra ports I'd advise using the mobo controller and disabling the second one in the BIOS to shave a few seconds off the boot. Edit: If you're not using the raid feature windows will be perfectly happy using a generic driver.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall
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My rule of thumb is two vm's per hard disk, more than that you will start having performance problems. I think the number of hard drives has a bigger impact then drive performance. The other rule of thumb is do run your vm's on same hard disk as your host OS. 2 cents.
MrPlankton
(bad guy)"Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go."
(good guy)"Which is where?"
(bad guy)"To a responsible future in a properly managed world."
Dean Koontz, The Good GuyWould you mind elaborating on "why"? I cant imagine how this would help, let alone be a Rule of Thumb. Or, perhaps, you meant "dont runt"?
:badger:
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For the best throughput, you need to get a PCIe controller card. Velociraptors are supposed to be the fastest, but when you get below 6ms access times, can you really tell a diff? The cables haven't changed between 1.5 and 3.0.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
but when you get below 6ms access times, can you really tell a diff?
If you're reading one single contiguous large file, the answer is no. But the more locations you want to access at the same time the bigger difference it makes. Think of a database.
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
but when you get below 6ms access times, can you really tell a diff?
If you're reading one single contiguous large file, the answer is no. But the more locations you want to access at the same time the bigger difference it makes. Think of a database.
Jörgen Andersson wrote:
Think of a database.
Why? He's running a VM...
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
It has recently come to my attention that my motherboards built in Nvidia SATA controller is crap and the SATA drives I have are the older SATA 1.5gbs spec. It has also come to my attention that on my quad core ram loaded system the disk is the bottleneck performance wise. Now that I'm working in a virtual machine exclusively I'm looking for top hard drive performance not only for working in the virtual machine but copying the virtual machine files back and forth between my boot drive and my virtual machine drive when I'm doing a "backup". I have a boot drive and a drive to contain the virtual machine "drives" and want to continue with this setup. For the hard drives I'm fairly certain the Velociraptors from Western Digital are the way to go barring anyone telling me differently but for the SATA controller(s) I'm a bit stumped. Should I use two separate controllers (space is getting tight, could be a problem) or is a single controller just as efficient for a two hard drive scenario? From what I can determine RAID 0 is not worth the expense for the miniscule performance gain and since I'm working virtual any raid system isn't really worth it, I can be back up and running in minutes if the hard drives pack it in. Any particular models or brands of controller I should look at? Is it likely I'll need different cables than the ones I'm using now for my old spec sata drives to go between the drive and the controller?
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
If you feel that you have way to much money to spend you should have a look at a SAS controller from LSI and match it with a Seagate Savvio 15k
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Jörgen Andersson wrote:
Think of a database.
Why? He's running a VM...
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001I was just making a point. The choice depends on patience, economy and what the VM is running.
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Would you mind elaborating on "why"? I cant imagine how this would help, let alone be a Rule of Thumb. Or, perhaps, you meant "dont runt"?
:badger:
...Having three VMs running on two spindles creates a lot of disk contention since every Windows installation has its' own pagefile.sys and normal OS based disk IO. When you factor in the host OS, you now have two OS' per spindle. Killer CPUs and memory can compensate for some of the Disk IO contention, but CPU and memory cannot overpower this much of a deficit. The lack of spindles can be the Achilles heel of this configuration....[^]
MrPlankton
(bad guy)"Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go."
(good guy)"Which is where?"
(bad guy)"To a responsible future in a properly managed world."
Dean Koontz, The Good Guy -
It has recently come to my attention that my motherboards built in Nvidia SATA controller is crap and the SATA drives I have are the older SATA 1.5gbs spec. It has also come to my attention that on my quad core ram loaded system the disk is the bottleneck performance wise. Now that I'm working in a virtual machine exclusively I'm looking for top hard drive performance not only for working in the virtual machine but copying the virtual machine files back and forth between my boot drive and my virtual machine drive when I'm doing a "backup". I have a boot drive and a drive to contain the virtual machine "drives" and want to continue with this setup. For the hard drives I'm fairly certain the Velociraptors from Western Digital are the way to go barring anyone telling me differently but for the SATA controller(s) I'm a bit stumped. Should I use two separate controllers (space is getting tight, could be a problem) or is a single controller just as efficient for a two hard drive scenario? From what I can determine RAID 0 is not worth the expense for the miniscule performance gain and since I'm working virtual any raid system isn't really worth it, I can be back up and running in minutes if the hard drives pack it in. Any particular models or brands of controller I should look at? Is it likely I'll need different cables than the ones I'm using now for my old spec sata drives to go between the drive and the controller?
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
-
It has recently come to my attention that my motherboards built in Nvidia SATA controller is crap and the SATA drives I have are the older SATA 1.5gbs spec. It has also come to my attention that on my quad core ram loaded system the disk is the bottleneck performance wise. Now that I'm working in a virtual machine exclusively I'm looking for top hard drive performance not only for working in the virtual machine but copying the virtual machine files back and forth between my boot drive and my virtual machine drive when I'm doing a "backup". I have a boot drive and a drive to contain the virtual machine "drives" and want to continue with this setup. For the hard drives I'm fairly certain the Velociraptors from Western Digital are the way to go barring anyone telling me differently but for the SATA controller(s) I'm a bit stumped. Should I use two separate controllers (space is getting tight, could be a problem) or is a single controller just as efficient for a two hard drive scenario? From what I can determine RAID 0 is not worth the expense for the miniscule performance gain and since I'm working virtual any raid system isn't really worth it, I can be back up and running in minutes if the hard drives pack it in. Any particular models or brands of controller I should look at? Is it likely I'll need different cables than the ones I'm using now for my old spec sata drives to go between the drive and the controller?
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
Say it with me: Velociraptor, Velociraptor, Velociraptor, Velociraptor! One for the OS (C:) and one for your Dev (D:) stuff.
Todd Smith
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Say it with me: Velociraptor, Velociraptor, Velociraptor, Velociraptor! One for the OS (C:) and one for your Dev (D:) stuff.
Todd Smith
Yeah that was my ultimate decision, I ordered two 300gb velociraptors which I'll raid 0 for performance. The SAS was promising at first but it had a too many things going against it, way high cost for not a really great deal more performance for desktop apps.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
