Hard drive short stroking fun - Part 1

I have previously tested some hard drives with HD Tune Pro. The goal was to make a comparison between 4 older WD Raptor 74GB hard drives in a 4 disk Raid-0, 2 WD 500GB AAKS series drives in a 2 disk Raid-0 and 1 WD 1TB Caviar Black hard drive.

Today, I revisited HD Tune to see the read/write speeds I could achieve using 1, 2 & 4 WD 640GB Caviar Blacks.  I tested the drives with no partitions on an Intel I7 950 & Asus P6X58D-E Motherboard, I used the onboard Intel Raid controller to setup the drives in combinations of single, 2 disk Raid-0 & 4 disk Raid-0 configurations.  The main purpose though was to play with hard drive short stroking and to see how much (if any) performance could be gained through excessive use of under partitioned hard drives. :D 

The results we pretty interesting although I wasn't totally blown away by the performance gain from the use of up to 4 full-size hard drives.  The 640GB drives were brand new and were laying around so I picked those to test with.  

The results!

Single 640GB WD WD6401AALS - HD Tune Pro Read Benchmark

After running this test I ran it again using the short stroke option.  Looking at the graph, it was obvious that the fastest min and max speeds came at 0GB to 64GB so that is the capacity I decided to limit the drive to.

Single 640GB WD WD6401AALS - 64GB Virtual Short Stroke - HD Tune Pro Read Benchmark

By limiting the drive to 64GB I increased the Minimum and Average Speed of the drive which became much more consistent however, the number I was most impressed by was the Access Time of 7.3 ms which is almost 4 ms lower than when the drive uses its full capacity!

I ran some random access tests and some write tests but the results really weren't much different than the read tests so the results have been omitted.

Next post part 2! 2 640GB Disk Raid-0 testing.