A1/A2 hard drive performance

When A1 came out i upgraded my system by purchasing a 150gb 10k RPM Raptor hard drive. It was like night and day. I recently made a video comparing a modern day, high-end 7200 RPM drive to the old Raptor because even with a new mainstream drive, it is like night and day. The performance from going from a 7200 drive that was defragmented by your standard "windows defrag" and a 10k RPM Raptor is like going from something that is barely playable with maxed out settings, to something that is very playable. Going a step further and short stroking, or defragmenting the drive with Ultimate Defrag is going from playable to nearly silky smooth. I could reduce the texture quality, but then it doesn't look quite as good. Even then the Raptor still easily outperforms the 7200rpm drive when textures are loaded.

The 7200 RPM drive in the video is a Western Digital 640GB "AAK", which is a dual platter drive. It is considered one of the faster of the 7200 drives on the market today. I did not call this topic "...On a FASTER hard drive" because speed is more subjective, and either drive could be called the faster of the two depending on what figures you look at. The 7200rpm AAK drive as FASTER read write speeds, but the Raptor has faster access times, and also more I/O capabilities which help for a game like ArmA and ArmA 2 where frequent reads are made.

the captures were recorded to another hard drive, so ArmA 2 reading and FRAPS recording were not made to the same hard drive.

i wish i had some solid state drives.

edit: here are some comparisons using a short-stroked 1+TB drive vs. the newer Velociraptors. Short stroking is by far more cost effective and if you could break down performance vs. cost, it would be far superior to the raptor or Vraptor, IMO. at the time i purchased my 1st gen raptor for the same price i could have gotten a 200-300gb drive, which would have had lower read/write speeds, slower access times and lower i/o capabilities. i can't find the link, but somewhere there is a thread on a computer hardware enthusiast site with members comparing short strok raid-0 arrays of 1TB drives and VRaptors and saw the exact same results of the TechWarslab link above. To put it in perspective, what Raptors were compared to a 7200 RPM drive untill the large 800+GB drives came out are what Solid State drives are today compared to a 7200 RPM drive as far has performance.

Any chance, for the sake of it posting up you're system component specs? (more for my own curiosity) :)

Intel Core i7 920 (4.2ghz, 21x200 w/ 1.22v)

6GB OCZ DDR3@1600 (3x2GB, 8-9-8-18 timings)

WD AAK 640GB (dual 320GB platter, WD6400AAKS)

WD 150GB Raptor (old model WD1500AHFD)

EVGA GTX275

BFG ModxStream 700watt PSU

Win7 RC 7100, 64bit

resolution is 1280x1024

Beware all raptor owners!My raptor just got toast.Controller failed,and it's common "feature" on raptors.So,if you have one take backup very often.

Beware all raptor owners!My raptor just got toast.Controller failed,and it's common "feature" on raptors.So,if you have one take backup very often.

Raptor specs are a tad misleading, yes, the RPM's are at 10K RPM, but you have to look at data transfer rates. I found my Raptor to be much slower in data transfer than a my Seagate 7200 RPM drives. Raptors are made really to be in a RAID-0 configuration, then the RPM's and Transfer rates are much better. Raptors run hotter and it's best to put at least one drive bay empty between two of them. Or heat-sync them.

Of course your machine may transfer data faster, but in my case the speedy drives, just couldn't offload as fast for some reason.

best scenario would be to just use an SSD, no? :O

Beware all raptor owners!My raptor just got toast.Controller failed,and it's common "feature" on raptors.So,if you have one take backup very often.

lol i have old old raptors that are 24/7... but yeah if you love it back it up.

More interesting, it'd be nice to see what 2 WD Black 640gb in RAID0 does vs the raptor... If they come closer to each other or if the faster access times on the vraptor still make it leap ahead.

my raptor never goes above 34*C (all system components idle between 30 and 32C), its cool to the touch.

they come with 5 year warranties, i have had mine for several years and it has never had any errors.

How are the specs misleading?

Raptor: 85MB/s Max read, 72MB/s average, Acess: 8.1ms, burst 12MB/s

640GB: 120MB/s Max read, 95MB/s average, Access: 16MS, Burst 130MB/s

raptor is in green:

edit: my arma+arma 2 folders take up ~30GB, so the first 5% of yellow, and 20% of green are where you want the lease access.

here is a link to the comparison of the hard drive i had at the time i bought the raptor (which was one of the faster of the 7200RPM drives of the time).

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g27/frag85/computer/HDD.jpg

Just by watching how much data is being transferred and how often, A1 and A2 really want access time. You have a lot of small, on the fly reads as new textures/models are loaded.

If anyone has SSD and a short stroked drive that would be interesting to see the arma mark results, or just frame rate results using the Fraps benchmark. I used to do that for tweaking A1 with a flight over Sahrani,

my raptor never goes above 34*C (all system components idle between 30 and 32C), its cool to the touch.

they come with 5 year warranties, i have had mine for several years and it has never had any errors.

How are the specs misleading?

Raptor: 85MB/s Max read, 72MB/s average, Acess: 8.1ms, burst 12MB/s

640GB: 120MB/s Max read, 95MB/s average, Access: 16MS, Burst 130MB/s

raptor is in green:

edit: my arma+arma 2 folders take up ~30GB, so the first 5% of yellow, and 20% of green are where you want the lease access.

here is a link to the comparison of the hard drive i had at the time i bought the raptor (which was one of the faster of the 7200RPM drives of the time).

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g27/frag85/computer/HDD.jpg

Just by watching how much data is being transferred and how often, A1 and A2 really want access time. You have a lot of small, on the fly reads as new textures/models are loaded.

If anyone has SSD and a short stroked drive that would be interesting to see the arma mark results, or just frame rate results using the Fraps benchmark. I used to do that for tweaking A1 with a flight over Sahrani,

I think it's because my raptors are older. I just got a cheap Seagate 1Tbyte drive for like $85 bucks and slapped it in, then ran the same test as you and that the raptor was slower in transfer rate. Once I get my new machine, I'm going to go with two Raptors in Raid-0 and be done with it. But Arma2 just hammers the drives constantly.

We should all be talking about hard drive speed alot more.

they come with 5 year warranties, i have had mine for several years and it has never had any errors.

If controller goes out you don't get any warning before it happens.When you need another controller (circuit board under the disk) which is same revision to save your stuff.

We should all be talking about hard drive speed alot more.

very true

I have been on these forums for a while now and I still see ppl posting their mega rigs without listing their HD configs...

I think it is possibly the most important component for A2..and of course we all know it is the slowest component in the PC...

my game has constant HD activity...

I have a very low spec rig but have two WD750 AAKS in raid 0 with all the swap file tweaks etc and I get a pretty good game...

I will up to SSD before I up my 9800GT

From the grave!

HDD vs SSD, 2nd half shows the loading time.

Watch it in HQ

SATA HDD vs SATAIII HDD vs SSD

thanks for these. Always nice to see how a component influences game performance.

But in this case I didn't really see much of a difference. Mabye it's just me though?

A3 Beta Ramdisk vs SSD vs HDD.

Almost no difference between the RD and SSD in loading times. Hardly any texture pop on the mechanical HDD.

note: I think the stuttering in the video is just dropped frames, the frame rate was hovering around 30 and I was trying to record at 30fps.

Here are some benchmarks for large file reads on my hard drives(greater than 4k):

Top left: Hitachi 1 TB, SATA III

Top Right: WD Black 1TB, SATA

Bottom: Intel 520 SSD

http://i.imgur.com/fjMl8.jpg (373 kB)

RamDisk

http://i.imgur.com/zIMNGyH.jpg (108 kB)

6.5GB/Sec :eek:

A3 Beta Ramdisk vs SSD vs HDD.

Almost no difference between the RD and SSD in loading times. Hardly any texture pop on the mechanical HDD.

note: I think the stuttering in the video is just dropped frames, the frame rate was hovering around 30 and I was trying to record at 30fps.

Here are some benchmarks for large file reads on my hard drives(greater than 4k):

Top left: Hitachi 1 TB, SATA III

Top Right: WD Black 1TB, SATA

Bottom: Intel 520 SSD

http://i.imgur.com/fjMl8.jpg (373 kB)

RamDisk

http://i.imgur.com/zIMNGyH.jpg (108 kB)

6.5GB/Sec :eek:

Great test. Did you put it onto the A3 forum..

Nice test - although some thoughts:

# Did you start the game with -nosplash -skipintro -world=empty?

# A3 engine/models might be more optimized

# Stratis might have too little different objects/models overall/in these scenes

# Chernarus in big cities would be a though test

# You might have to push the engine more with faster camera speed and quicker/more frequent camera position jumps

;2430975']Nice test - although some thoughts:

# Did you start the game with -nosplash -skipintro -world=empty?

# A3 engine/models might be more optimized

# Stratis might have too little different objects/models overall/in these scenes

# Chernarus in big cities would be a though test

# You might have to push the engine more with faster camera speed and quicker/more frequent camera position jumps

No' date=' just the standard launch from Steam, no arguments, so some of the terrain was already loaded from the 'spy plane' menu background. Startup is pretty much identical between the Ramdisk and the SSD though. The only real difference is between the SSD and HDD.

I think #2 and 3 play with each other. Stratis is such a small island with so little content. It barely uses much of my video memory, and I don't have much. The newer A3Beta version of A3Mark on armaholic doesn't seem as demanding as the A3Alpha version, or A2mark.

I haven't messed around with any additional islands yet in A3.

I was using the A3Mark because its publicly available to make it easier for people to make a comparison to their own system. I was actually messing around with this a little in A2. Quick camera flight along the southern edge of the continent, then NW towards the large airfield. It would have been interesting to see with the initial release version of A2 since much of the streaming/stuttering has been greatly reduced.

Today I went through and did an A2 test using ArmA2Mark. Results were very similar. And here I have world=empty.

Conclusion:

Bottom Line, Not really worth it. Maybe if you have unlimted funds and nothing better to do with your money.

TL:DR

Can you do a test with AllInArma and load the built in A2 benchmarks with a bigger map such as Chernarus? You can use ARMA2 FREE from steam instead.

Or even A2mark running AIA.

SDD on SATA 3 GBs, SATA 6 GBS, HDD SATA 3 and 6 GBS vs RAMDISK.

So far, I have an HDD on SATA 3 GBS vs an 8 GB RAMDISK. RAMDISK wins by a large margin for me but I am considering a SDD just for ARMA 2/CO, ARMA 3, and GTA series including the upcoming installment. If ram was cheaper like last year, I would get more ram hands down.

Edit- noted you did ran the A2 benchmark. :D Thanks!

Can you do a test with AllInArma and load the built in A2 benchmarks with a bigger map such as Chernarus? You can use ARMA2 FREE from steam instead.

Or even A2mark running AIA.

SDD on SATA 3 GBs, SATA 6 GBS, HDD SATA 3 and 6 GBS vs RAMDISK.

So far, I have an HDD on SATA 3 GBS vs an 8 GB RAMDISK. RAMDISK wins by a large margin for me but I am considering a SDD just for ARMA 2/CO, ARMA 3, and GTA series including the upcoming installment. If ram was cheaper like last year, I would get more ram hands down.

Edit- noted you did ran the A2 benchmark. :D Thanks!

The A2 benchmark crashes in A3 using AiA.

Just get an SSD. There isn't much to be gained by a Ramdisk once you have the SSD.

Old thread, but I want to keep the work I've done in the same thread.

I re-did the A3 test with 1.14 coming out. The ramdisk software I am using now; Softperfect Ramdisk, is giving me about 10GB/s sequential and just over 1GB/s random 4k read/write. I tossed them a few $ donation because this ramdisk software has all the features I was looking for.

If you watch it on youtube, there are links to the indivitual videos. You can youtubedoubler it or watch on 2 monitors if you want a clearer picture.