In last week’s thrilling episode, we let the intrusive thoughts win and built a completely nonsensical dual Xeon space heater monster of a server system. But there’s so many more bad ideas we can explore with the build.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today, before we start turning this into a proper home server that will hold data safely, let’s live on the edge for a while and explore how Windows handles striping data across hard drives in pools for maximum speed and minimum safety. And while were at it, we can examine how NVMe SSDs can slow down as they get pumped full of your stuff. Gross.
First off, in case you missed it, let me re-iterate, this is a bad idea. Don’t do it. This is just for science. Let’s get some baseline results first.
This 1TB SSD is currently about one third full of Windows 11 and it’s associated drivers and updates, and a couple of benchmark games for a total of 330GB. If we run the CrystalDiskMark test, we get these results, which are in line with the marketing promises. For today’s experiment we’re probably most focused on the read speeds, as I think that’s the limiting factor for the day to day user experience.
Of those read speeds, the big number on the top line is the most attention grabbing, and is, broadly speaking, the determining factor in moving large chunks of contiguous data around, such as video files and loading up most modern game engines.
It’s the bottom number, roughly speaking reflecting how quickly the drive can access many small files in rapid succession that’s the thing than can make your operating system feel sluggish, so arguably that’s more important for your overall computing experience.
This isn’t the world’s fastest SSD, and it’s running on an older PCIe generation, so speeds can go up to over four times as fast as this, but at about three and a half thousand megabytes per second for large transfers and fifty-odd for smaller files, this is still going to be leagues faster than a hard drive.
Speaking of, let’s load in a 8TB Hitachi 7200rpm hard drive and see what results it delivers.
Ick. Two hundred megabytes per second for large files and about one megabyte per second for small files. That’s why us older folks will remember the wild step change in performance than came from running your OS off a SSD rather than spinning rust. So, hard drives are slow confirmed, to the surprise of no-one.
Right, let’s slap another drive in here, and set up a striped volume in the disk management tool, which is essentially building a software RAID0 implementation. Simplistically, as you write a file to disk, it gets split in half and written to two disks rather than one, so potentially that could double the speed for reads and writes. The obvious downside is that if one of your disks fail, all your data is destroyed, which is a bad thing.
You’ll see we’re getting close to twice as fast on the large files, and a decent percentage jump on the small files, but 2 megabytes per second is still pretty painful in absolute terms.
Well, let’s keep going. Let’s add a third drive, and 560 megabytes per second isn’t perfect scaling but still a solid jump, and we’re now firmly in SATA SSD territory for large files. But the small bump to the smaller file read speed isn’t helping us so much.
Let’s keep going with a fourth drive, and it’s a similar story, so let’s crash on and we’ll round this nonsense off with a fifth drive, and look at where we’ve landed up. That eight hundred and fifty megabytes per second for the large files is a pretty incredible number for spinning hard disks, and is approaching first generation NVMe drive territory. The smaller file speeds remain utterly dismal though, in fact showing a slight drop but they’ve all been much of a muchness and would remain a very painful way to run an operating system
So there you go. Some tempting gains to be sure, and I’ve done one build in the past with two SATA SSD’s running striped purely for game install so nothing critical, but please exercise great care with these forbidden techniques. This is a risk profile you should not be comfortable with. Even I’m not this much of an edgelord.
Let’s find out how the NVMe drive is getting on. It’s now about three quarters full of data, so let’s run the benchmark test again. The large file read speeds are mostly the same, although you’ll see about a 30% drop in the read speeds of the small files. The write speeds, on large files are also dropping quite a bit. This, I’m told, is due to garbage collection overheads causing issues for the controllers.
There’s good news and bad news as we fill the drive up further. Spinning time forwards a bit, it’s now roughly 96% percent full, and the benchmark results are now much the same as at 76% full.
I suppose that’s good in as much as there’s a limit to the drop off in performance, and of course that performance is still orders of magnitude faster than spinning rust. It’s just a bit disappointing that you’re pretty much guaranteed to fall over that performance cliff – SSDs are expensive enough that no-one’s leaving them less than half full, and not getting the performance figures on the box does leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. So, do bear this in mind if you start noticing your PC slowing down – it may be time to delete some data.
Until then, If you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.