Hard disk partitions and optimization

I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one comes up a
bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests. Could that be due to
the fact that it is set up as the slave drive (the other one is the Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob files are 1
GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much irrelevant for
disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing and transcoding takes
quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about an hour
and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I had forgotten to
enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done. Would that have made any
difference (at the level that BING runs at)?

Just wanted to jump in for a second and mention other options, is that you can
use a PCI card so that you can run both your HD's as Master's, and as well
have them on their own separate feed, which also makes room for you to run your
CDRW and CD/DVD on their own separate feeds as well each as master too.
Besides the advantages of that, using the Controller PCI Card has the
known inherent increase of performance of your whole system running
through this setup can give you up to a 25% boost in the real-time processing
of data, I've seen sometimes even 35% ..this increase is similar to what the
application accelerator software can do - but in this case is so much better as
hardware - it's a no contest; application accelerator software applications are
the pits anyway.

This increase is realized especially with higher than 1GHz and even moreso with
2 GHz + machines is the best increase, but even for yours @ 800 MHz would see a
respectable gain too. ...just talking outloud about it...

I would not run a W98 system without one, and for that matter W2K/WXP

You can use whichever brand you like, but the best is a Promise Ultra133 TX2
Controller Card and here's just one place you can get them
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...102-007&depa=0

Rick



Bill in Co. wrote:
I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one
comes up a bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests.
Could that be due to the fact that it is set up as the slave drive
(the other one is the Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob
files are 1 GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much
irrelevant for disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing
and transcoding takes quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about
an hour and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I
had forgotten to enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done.
Would that have made any difference (at the level that BING runs at)?

You haven't mentioned the SiSoft figures, so it's hard to tell whether it's
worth keeping everything on the faster drive, but I would guess that
fragmentation will have a bigger effect than any difference in drive
performance, and that will be much easier to control on the slave drive.

Also, keeping your files spread across two drives (eg, application, temp and
swap on one drive, video files on the other) will allow the system to make
maximum use of the drive cache.

Enabling DMA would make a very large difference to drive performance in
WINDOWS. AFAIK BING would use DMA if it's available, but you would need to
confirm that with the BING documentation.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one comes up
a
bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests. Could that be due
to
the fact that it is set up as the slave drive (the other one is the
Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob files are
1
GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much irrelevant for
disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing and transcoding takes
quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about an
hour
and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I had forgotten
to
enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done. Would that have made
any
difference (at the level that BING runs at)?

Jeff Richards wrote:
You haven't mentioned the SiSoft figures, so it's hard to tell whether
it's
worth keeping everything on the faster drive, but I would guess that
fragmentation will have a bigger effect than any difference in drive
performance, and that will be much easier to control on the slave drive.

Both drives (which are identical) were defragmented (and I do this often)

If you can believe the Sisoft figures, here they are (even the help file
says they may not be accurate):

Old drive (master): Drive Index = 37000, Sequential read& write = 56 Mbps
New drive (slave): Drive Index = 23000, Sequential read& write = 33 Mbps

Buffered read and write rates are about the same for both drives (70-80
Mbps)

I'm still thinking that the master/slave thing enters into this, but I'm not
sure. I get similar SMART values for both drives when I run the Western
Digital "SMART" hard disk information utilities.

Also, keeping your files spread across two drives (eg, application, temp
and
swap on one drive, video files on the other) will allow the system to make
maximum use of the drive cache.

Enabling DMA would make a very large difference to drive performance in
WINDOWS.

Yeah, I knew that much from the video stuff I had been doing. It would
have helped, however, if I remembered to check that for the new drive!

AFAIK BING would use DMA if it's available, but you would need
to confirm that with the BING documentation.

Next time I'm in BING at least I'll have that option.

Frankly I'm surprised that when I installed the second drive that the DMA
was not automatically selected, so I had to go and do that. I had
completely forgotten to do that, until I saw it flagged in Sisoft (THANK
GOODNESS!!!)

--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one comes
up a bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests. Could that be
due
to the fact that it is set up as the slave drive (the other one is the
Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob files
are
1 GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much irrelevant
for
disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing and transcoding
takes
quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about an
hour
and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I had forgotten
to
enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done. Would that have made
any difference (at the level that BING runs at)?

Now that is an interesting idea. I think if I end up using this machine
pretty heavily, I should probably consider it.

Rick Chauvin wrote:
Just wanted to jump in for a second and mention other options, is that you
can
use a PCI card so that you can run both your HD's as Master's, and as well
have them on their own separate feed, which also makes room for you to run
your CDRW and CD/DVD on their own separate feeds as well each as master
too.
Besides the advantages of that, using the Controller PCI Card has the
known inherent increase of performance of your whole system running
through this setup can give you up to a 25% boost in the real-time
processing
of data, I've seen sometimes even 35% ..this increase is similar to what
the
application accelerator software can do - but in this case is so much
better
as hardware - it's a no contest; application accelerator software
applications are the pits anyway.

This increase is realized especially with higher than 1GHz and even moreso
with 2 GHz + machines is the best increase, but even for yours @ 800 MHz
would see a respectable gain too. ...just talking outloud about it...

I would not run a W98 system without one, and for that matter W2K/WXP

You can use whichever brand you like, but the best is a Promise Ultra133
TX2
Controller Card and here's just one place you can get them

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...102-007&depa=0

Rick



Bill in Co. wrote:
I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one
comes up a bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests.
Could that be due to the fact that it is set up as the slave drive
(the other one is the Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob
files are 1 GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much
irrelevant for disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing
and transcoding takes quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about
an hour and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I
had forgotten to enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done.
Would that have made any difference (at the level that BING runs at)?

An update to one part below. I just tried AIDA32's disk benchmarking
plugin (at least for the read operations), and got nearly the same results
for both disks. Also, the new hard disk is nearly full (but just
temporarily) with a bunch of junk in both partitions, unlike the old drive,
so that might have been a factor, too. Who knows..


Bill in Co. wrote:
Jeff Richards wrote:
You haven't mentioned the SiSoft figures, so it's hard to tell whether
it's
worth keeping everything on the faster drive, but I would guess that
fragmentation will have a bigger effect than any difference in drive
performance, and that will be much easier to control on the slave drive.

Both drives (which are identical) were defragmented (and I do this often)

If you can believe the Sisoft figures, here they are (even the help file
says they may not be accurate):

Old drive (master): Drive Index = 37000, Sequential read& write = 56 Mbps
New drive (slave): Drive Index = 23000, Sequential read& write = 33 Mbps

Buffered read and write rates are about the same for both drives (70-80
Mbps)

I'm still thinking that the master/slave thing enters into this, but I'm
not
sure. I get similar SMART values for both drives when I run the Western
Digital "SMART" hard disk information utilities.

Also, keeping your files spread across two drives (eg, application, temp
and
swap on one drive, video files on the other) will allow the system to
make
maximum use of the drive cache.

Enabling DMA would make a very large difference to drive performance in
WINDOWS.

Yeah, I knew that much from the video stuff I had been doing. It would
have helped, however, if I remembered to check that for the new drive!

AFAIK BING would use DMA if it's available, but you would need
to confirm that with the BING documentation.

Next time I'm in BING at least I'll have that option.

Frankly I'm surprised that when I installed the second drive that the DMA
was not automatically selected, so I had to go and do that. I had
completely forgotten to do that, until I saw it flagged in Sisoft (THANK
GOODNESS!!!)

--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one comes
up a bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests. Could that
be
due to the fact that it is set up as the slave drive (the other one is
the
Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob files
are
1 GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much irrelevant
for
disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing and transcoding
takes
quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about an
hour
and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I had forgotten
to
enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done. Would that have made
any difference (at the level that BING runs at)?

It's not possible to keep the drive with the operating system properly
defragged for any length of time, as the system does so much writing of its
own. But you can isolate the other drives from OS activity and they will
stay defragged for much longer. I am not aware of any factor in the
Master/Slave arrangement of IDE controllers that would create such a speed
difference as SiSoft reports unless there were differences in the drives
themselves or the way they were configured. Therefore, I am inclined to
believe the Aida results and doubt the SiSoft results. Whether or not the
disk is nearly full should not affect a benchmark (although it does
significantly affect ordinary operations).
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
An update to one part below. I just tried AIDA32's disk benchmarking
plugin (at least for the read operations), and got nearly the same results
for both disks. Also, the new hard disk is nearly full (but just
temporarily) with a bunch of junk in both partitions, unlike the old
drive,
so that might have been a factor, too. Who knows..


Bill in Co. wrote:
Jeff Richards wrote:
You haven't mentioned the SiSoft figures, so it's hard to tell whether
it's
worth keeping everything on the faster drive, but I would guess that
fragmentation will have a bigger effect than any difference in drive
performance, and that will be much easier to control on the slave drive.

Both drives (which are identical) were defragmented (and I do this often)

If you can believe the Sisoft figures, here they are (even the help file
says they may not be accurate):

Old drive (master): Drive Index = 37000, Sequential read& write = 56
Mbps
New drive (slave): Drive Index = 23000, Sequential read& write = 33
Mbps

Buffered read and write rates are about the same for both drives (70-80
Mbps)

I'm still thinking that the master/slave thing enters into this, but I'm
not
sure. I get similar SMART values for both drives when I run the Western
Digital "SMART" hard disk information utilities.

Also, keeping your files spread across two drives (eg, application, temp
and
swap on one drive, video files on the other) will allow the system to
make
maximum use of the drive cache.

Enabling DMA would make a very large difference to drive performance in
WINDOWS.

Yeah, I knew that much from the video stuff I had been doing. It would
have helped, however, if I remembered to check that for the new drive!

AFAIK BING would use DMA if it's available, but you would need
to confirm that with the BING documentation.

Next time I'm in BING at least I'll have that option.

Frankly I'm surprised that when I installed the second drive that the DMA
was not automatically selected, so I had to go and do that. I had
completely forgotten to do that, until I saw it flagged in Sisoft (THANK
GOODNESS!!!)

--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one comes
up a bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests. Could that
be
due to the fact that it is set up as the slave drive (the other one is
the
Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob files
are
1 GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much irrelevant
for
disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing and transcoding
takes
quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about an
hour
and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I had
forgotten
to
enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done. Would that have made
any difference (at the level that BING runs at)?

Interesting. I just cleaned up the drives (removed half of the stuff) and
reran Sisoft, and this time the results were similar for both drives. So
who knows. At any rate, I feel better that the results are about the same
now for both drives. Maybe when I get up in the morning it will all be
different if I were to check it again with Sisoft - (I wouldn't be totally
surprised :-)

Jeff Richards wrote:
It's not possible to keep the drive with the operating system properly
defragged for any length of time, as the system does so much writing of
its
own. But you can isolate the other drives from OS activity and they will
stay defragged for much longer. I am not aware of any factor in the
Master/Slave arrangement of IDE controllers that would create such a speed
difference as SiSoft reports unless there were differences in the drives
themselves or the way they were configured. Therefore, I am inclined to
believe the Aida results and doubt the SiSoft results. Whether or not the
disk is nearly full should not affect a benchmark (although it does
significantly affect ordinary operations).
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
An update to one part below. I just tried AIDA32's disk benchmarking
plugin (at least for the read operations), and got nearly the same
results
for both disks. Also, the new hard disk is nearly full (but just
temporarily) with a bunch of junk in both partitions, unlike the old
drive,
so that might have been a factor, too. Who knows..


Bill in Co. wrote:
Jeff Richards wrote:
You haven't mentioned the SiSoft figures, so it's hard to tell whether
it's
worth keeping everything on the faster drive, but I would guess that
fragmentation will have a bigger effect than any difference in drive
performance, and that will be much easier to control on the slave
drive.

Both drives (which are identical) were defragmented (and I do this
often)

If you can believe the Sisoft figures, here they are (even the help file
says they may not be accurate):

Old drive (master): Drive Index = 37000, Sequential read& write = 56
Mbps
New drive (slave): Drive Index = 23000, Sequential read& write = 33
Mbps

Buffered read and write rates are about the same for both drives (70-80
Mbps)

I'm still thinking that the master/slave thing enters into this, but I'm
not
sure. I get similar SMART values for both drives when I run the
Western
Digital "SMART" hard disk information utilities.

Also, keeping your files spread across two drives (eg, application,
temp
and swap on one drive, video files on the other) will allow the system
to
make maximum use of the drive cache.

Enabling DMA would make a very large difference to drive performance in
WINDOWS.

Yeah, I knew that much from the video stuff I had been doing. It would
have helped, however, if I remembered to check that for the new drive!

AFAIK BING would use DMA if it's available, but you would need
to confirm that with the BING documentation.

Next time I'm in BING at least I'll have that option.

Frankly I'm surprised that when I installed the second drive that the
DMA
was not automatically selected, so I had to go and do that. I had
completely forgotten to do that, until I saw it flagged in Sisoft (THANK
GOODNESS!!!)

--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one
comes
up a bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests. Could that
be
due to the fact that it is set up as the slave drive (the other one is
the
Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob files
are
1 GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much irrelevant
for
disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing and transcoding
takes
quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about
an
hour and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I had
forgotten
to
enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done. Would that have
made
any difference (at the level that BING runs at)?

"Bill in Co." wrote in message
...
I've got two supposedly identical WD 40GB drives, but the new one comes up
a
bit slower in the SiSoft hard disk benchmark tests. Could that be due
to
the fact that it is set up as the slave drive (the other one is the
Master)?

Does it make sense to put all heavy video work on the Master drive to
improve the performance time? I mean, some of these video vob files are
1
GB each. Or is the master slave difference pretty much irrelevant for
disk file reads and writes? (Any mpg video editing and transcoding takes
quite a bit of time with an 800 MHz machine!)

I also remembered something else. I think I told ya it took about an
hour
and a half to COPY a nearly full 20 GB partition. But I had forgotten
to
enable DMA on that drive, which I have now done. Would that have made
any
difference (at the level that BING runs at)?


Its impossible for the PC to read/write on one hard drive and read/write to
another hard drive on the same ide ribbon cable at the SAME time.
Some performance software may monitor performance, and write monitoring
results and assessments while doing the reads/writes on another hard drive.
See above and make your conclusions.

DMA usage tasks the DMA controller to move the data and does not call the
control processor unit to utilize physical memory during this task. If the
hard disk controller is operating correctly, data flow will move in 32 bit
format vs PIO mode 16 bit format.

DMA use allows the control processor unit to concentrate on video data
transcoding vice doing both that and moving the data to a physical location
(HD).

Using an alternate physical ide HD controller (add-on) would allow
simultaneous reads/writes when doing video transcoding and editing, if the
other physical hard drive is connected to this alternate controller. This
also makes for faster imaging files of other hard drives and their
partitions. An add-on ide controller uses a technique similar to SCSI for
moving data in windows mode. Has little impact, similar to DMA in this
respect, on the control processor unit.

It will revert back to a slower mode when used in dos real mode as data
cannot be moved simultaneously (reads/writes) in dos real mode. DMA does
not work in dos real mode either. And, the data will move in 16 bit PIO
mode in dos real mode.

Bill in Co. wrote:
Jeff Richards wrote:
You haven't mentioned the SiSoft figures, so it's hard to tell
whether it's worth keeping everything on the faster drive, but I
would guess that fragmentation will have a bigger effect than any
difference in drive performance, and that will be much easier to
control on the slave drive.

Both drives (which are identical) were defragmented (and I do this
often)

If you can believe the Sisoft figures, here they are (even the help
file says they may not be accurate):

Old drive (master): Drive Index = 37000, Sequential read& write = 56
Mbps New drive (slave): Drive Index = 23000, Sequential read& write
= 33 Mbps

Buffered read and write rates are about the same for both drives
(70-80 Mbps)

I'm still thinking that the master/slave thing enters into this, but
I'm not sure. I get similar SMART values for both drives when I run
the Western Digital "SMART" hard disk information utilities.

So swap them around and be sure.

--
dadiOH
____________________________

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