Hard drive short stroking fun – Part 2

Hard drive short stroking fun – Part 2

Continued from Part 1, my testing of WD 640GB Caviar Black hard drives continues! 

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.