Short-Stroking

Hey all..
So, I've read a couple of articles about short-stroking disks.. I've done some research but couldn't find the answer to something:

If I make a partition just about the size of the OS (win7) on a 500gb hd, would that boost performance during the use of windows? Would installing games and apps on the other partition be ok (boost here not intended)?

 

Yes it works though I doubt the way you do it would help.

The objective of short-stroking is to use the fastest part of the HDD and don't touch (if possible) the rest. So if you install your application on the 'slower' partition, you defeat the purpose as unless you don't access them, the disk head still flys back and forth across the whole thing.

What I have done is that I partition my first 120G or so (which based on what I have seen in HDTune where the performance is more or less the same across it) and use it as the C:. The rest I just use as kind of 'secondary' storage for access once in a year kind of thing.

Beside, short stroking for just the Windows system IMO doesn't help much other than the 'initial' boot up. As most of the needed files would be loaded in memory on boot up and would not be touch again and I seldom boot my machine.

 

I see..I understood it better now. I'm formatting without partitioning.
Thank you for the fast & clear reply!
+1 rep

 

You won't see a huge boost in performance, and you may even see lesser performance as Windows 7 performs defragmentation to put frequently read files where they can be accessed faster, and doing short-stroking will prevent some of that.
If you want to speed up your drive, get an eSATA external for data and an SSD for the OS and apps

 

While that is true, there are other factors to consider.

Mainly how the NTFS driver find its free space. If it always takes first from the largest free block (that was initially at the back), new files will be written further into the slower area.

To avoid this from happening, short stroking is still a good thing if one knows the usage pattern (like I know for sure my average usage is no more than 60G or so which is why I have my C: as 120G to prevent uncessary fragmentation yet can be sure the slow part would not be used except when I use it)

 

Meh. SSD's have come down to a price point that I would consider to be affordable. If you really want performance, then an SSD is really the way to go.

Short-stroking was a lot of hassle, and made sense for the uber-performance enthusiasts to try and squeeze every little bit of performance out of a mechanical hard drive, at the cost of some inconvenience. That was when mechanical hard drives were the best that you could get. To me, short-stroking a mechanical hard drive is like taking a $20,000 Honda Civic and doing lots and lots of custom tuning work to it, when what you really need is to just spend the $80,000 and get a faster car.

 

Agree and disagree.

I bought a new Scorpio Black 500G because my old 3+ years 5400rpm was almost full and slower. I split the drive into 120G/380G which is not much hassle(partition a disk is very easy these days). I didn't get a SSD(for this particular notebook) as it is IDE mode only so I can't gain much.

 

Yeah guys but the reason I was wondering about doing short-stroking was because I can't afford a SSD right now.

Now, it probably won't do much here because I know my "average use" is a bit unstable..

 

get a momentus xt, more or less the cost of a hdd, but performance near to an ssd.

short stroking only really works if you don't need the storage. but then it means you pay the cost for a 500gb disk to f.e. use only 50gb of it. (and it has to be that drastic to really show actual gains).

chimpanzee: your partitioning was for nothing (if it's about performance or savety or something). and btw, i used ide ssds in the past, they work great and enhance performance quite a bit, there, too

 

I have to disagree with you here.

Yes, the Seagate Momentus XT improves load times and boot times. But the biggest benefit of an SSD is not load times. Any drive can boot an OS or load a single application quickly.

The biggest advantage of an SSD is its performance under multitasking load, measured by IOPS (specifically, random read speeds and random IOPS). And an SSD will be almost two full orders of magnitude faster (100x faster) than any drive based off of mechanical physics. Combine that with how SSD performance scales with NCQ, and you get a drive that will never ever choke on disk I/O, no matter how much you throw at it.

I've pushed this video a few times before on these forums. It's an extreme example of SSD response to extreme multitasking load. I boot Windows, and load every single application installed on my work laptop (27 apps) in about 1 minute.
YouTube - Why I love my SSD - Windows 7 boot + loading 27 applications in about 1 minute.

Most mechanical drives would barely be at the Windows desktop after 1 minute, let alone finished loading 27 applications and putting the laptop in a usable state. You can only get that kind of performance from a non-mechanical drive like an SSD.

 

you explain me, nr. 1 poster on the ssd threads the gains of ssds?

maybe you read up a bit on the xt. so far it serves well as a "cheap i'd-like-an-ssd replacement".

(hint: i only use ssds, and do so since now > 2 years)

 

What do you mean by for nothing ? It is not for safty as in 'backup'. But there are other benefits like my notebook comes with a backup/restore program which can(and was) using the D: as the storage media for the image.

Nope, I know if my HDD crash, that is not safe but it is a good 'snapshot' so if I screw up (software wise like install program or upgrade to W7 but want to undo), it serves me well.

What made you think that I don't get performance improvement ?

As for SSD in IDE, I know it would still be faster but I don't want to pay 200 bucks vs 60 when the gain is only marginal.

 

I don't believe in 'short-stroking' on a notebook (we don't have unlimited HDD bays...), but I do believe effective partitioning makes a difference as seen in these 'scores' here:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...le-copy-result-hdds-ssds-easy-comparison.html


Note that both my Hitachi and XT HDD's are at the top of the mechanical drives scores and they both even surpasses the lowest SSD score too.

This is acheived with the following partitioning scheme which I use a version of in all my notebook and desktop systems:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-hitachi-7k500-benchmark-setup-specifics.html


A quick overview of the above partitioning strategy:

Puts the 'Temp' files on the fastest part of the HD - these files are the ones that are constantly changed/created/deleted and therefore need the fastest drive access - always.

Puts Windows on the second fastest partition and properly setup, it keeps this partition from getting easily or quickly fragmented.

Used with PerfectDisk Professional 11, not only does this strategy offer high performance initially, but also sustains the performance while actually using the system too.

A lot of people will say this is too much work -but the 'numbers' in the first link speak for themselves (up to 50% faster than similar drives without partitioning).

When you want the most speed at the lowest cost - a fast 7200 RPM HD with the above partitioning will give you that - along with PD to maintain that performance over time.

Good luck.

 

I too have to disagree with this. If you guys noticed the reviews were all carefully setup to show the advantage of the Momentus XT. In otherword's it was as if they took a mechanical hard drive, short stroked it then released the benchmarks like they were legitimate expectations for the hard drive when in reality the operating system, and a typical user data files would render any short stroking useless (40gb~ is typically the short stroking limit).

This is actually worse on the Momentus XT with a capacity of only 4gb of SSD. That's barely enough for allowing for a windows load times and maybe 2-3 applications, afterwards your performance is back to regular. Second it uses adaptive caching meaning the hard drive will automatically choose which programs to put into the flash memory for fast access. Third since it is adaptive caching it will take a few uses of the wanted software (maybe dozens for it to become a "priority" program for it go into the flash memory cache.

Edit: I was corrected. The Momentus XT uses SLC NAND (should be great) however there are no specifications other then read/writes.

Anyways in the end as mentioned before the biggest advantage of a SSD is the insane IOP's

 

1) cheap flash modules? they're SLC, that's the top line of flash. too expensive to get used in ordinary ssds in stores right now.

2) it's adapting, which is exactly why it's better than shortstroking. it's at worse as fast as the typical hdd, but at best (means for your frequently used stuff) as fast as an ssd. shortstroking removes all your storage gains over an ssd for a bit performance gain (much less than having an ssd).

so what do you want? near ssd performance for the stuff you use most, and hdd performance for the rest? or a bit better than hdd performance for everything, but far away from ssd performance for what you use most?

to chimpanzee: well, you lose any performance benefit the moment you have data somewhere else than c: because at this moment you force your data to be far away from eachother. so when you open a word document, it has to fetch the file from d:, and winword.exe from c:. this means lots of big jumps with the needle, resulting in WORSE performance than not having partitioned at all.

unless you plan to spend huge amounts of time to find out in a very specific need that you can gain some tiny bit of performance, like tiller did, partitioning is useless. it's actually worse than useless: it forces your system to accept the borders, instead of optimizing while defragging any way it wants. (like all the doc files near to winword.exe, so if you open a doc, it opens it fast)

those things are all very simple:

ssd > momentus xt > any other hdd

shortstroking == buying a 500gb hdd to reduce it to a 50gb hdd. at this point, a 64gb ssd wouldn't have cost much more, and, again, have given much better performance.

 

Edit: I was corrected. The Momentus XT uses SLC NAND (should be great) however there are no specifications other then read/writes.

Yes the 4gb of SSD cache are far better then using a 4gb short stroked partition but your forgetting the short stroked partition can be up to 40gb in size compared to the 4gb SSD cache which uses adaptive caching meaning it will only save the most used programs/files. The user has no choice in the matter unless the spam the program repeatedly.
4gb of SSD is simply not enough for a cache other then to boast about slightly faster boot times. I can understand where boot times can be important but most of the time the Momentus XT SSD cache's performance will go unnoticed.

 

The Seagate Momentus XT does indeed use SLC NAND flash memory. Compared to MLC memory, SLC memory generally has faster write speeds, lower power consumption, and longer write lifespans. However, it is more expensive, which is why you see SSD drives made entirely of SLC memory only in enterprise drives (consumer drives use MLC memory).

Drives can't really be compared by looking at sequential read/write times or burst read/write times. Everyone looks at those numbers, because they are the "big" numbers. But if you want to see how a drive performs in the real world, take a look at random read times. And when it comes to random reads, a Seagate Momentus XT is barely faster than a mechanical drive. By comparison, an SSD is almost two orders of magnitude faster (100x faster) than mechanical drives or the Seagate Momentus XT when it comes to random read speeds or IOPS.

I have to agree here. If the Seagate Momentus XT has a larger cache of SLC NAND memory, then I could see how it would really shine in performance. But a 4GB adaptive cache is pretty small. And any time you need to retrieve data off of the mechanical platters, you're incurring a HUGE performance hit.

The only time I can see where the Seagate Momentus XT is worthwhile is if someone needs the capacity / price of the SMXT, and is willing to sacrifice some performance in order to get it. However, there are people out there (like me) that are pure performance junkies and are willing to pay for it. For people who want only the best in performance, only an SSD will do.

 

This is not always the case very old SLC NAND modules (terms of lithography etc) are actually slower then newer MLC.

If it does indeed use SLC NAND I still can't find any information past Techreport so at the moment all we can do is go by what we know and that is that it is SLC and it peaks at 140MB/s read and 100MB/s writes. Write/erease limits are unknown, IOP's are unknown since programs do not use the SSD cache on the Momentus XT. etc etc

 

You seem to be saying exactly the same thing I said to the OP. May be you have to re-read what I said how I use my C: and D: drive. My D: is used as a convenient archive(ISO, snapshot image).

 

Hey guys, forget the numbers (benchmarks, I mean).

Hows this:

Downloaded and installed the MSE 2.0 update earlier today.

Updated the definitions and ran a quick scan on the same system with different drives:

U30Jc 8GB RAM with Inferno 100GB SSD, time: 55 seconds.

U30Jc 8GB RAM with Hitachi 7K500 (partitioned), time: 98 seconds.

U30Jc 8GB RAM with Seagate XT (partitioned), time: 57 seconds.


While it looks like the SSD is dominating here, consider this: the two HDD's are configured exactly the same (with all the same partitions, data and programs/utilities) while the SSD is a small subset of those programs/utilities that the HDD's can hold (capacity-wise) easily.

The Inferno quick scanned just over 22K items in those 55 seconds, while the 7K500 scanned 112K items in 98 seconds and the XT completed it's quick scan in 57 seconds with 119K items scanned.

The XT Hybrid is the fastest mechanical based drive, period.

It's not the amount of nand it has - it is the algorithm used that makes it the best (btw, firmware SD24).

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Some of those 'parts' is the partitioning too.

 

Anandtech's review also reports it as using SLC, as does Storagereview.com's review, Fudzilla's report, and finally, Seagate's own data sheet for the Momentus XT.

 

Gotcha. Just searching the model numbers yielded no results, bad searching on my part. Thanks for the information.

Edit: I have edited my other posts to reflect the correction.