Hi,
I've been installing some small older mSATA drives (which use SATA II I believe) into laptops that I rebuild to sell or give away to people who need them. The drives are mostly 32GB (one is 128GB) and I install Windows 10 on these drives to increase boot speed and to create extra space on the rotating HDD.
Once RS became available, I thought it would be useful to benchmark the mSATA drives and preferentially install the fastest ones.
I obtained some surprising (to me) and inconsistent results when I ran RS several times on the same drive, which I will attempt to document here. I kept re-running RS on each drive until the results were consistent.
These 32GB tests were done using RS-PR8, but, unfortunately, I reformatted the USB stick and lost the original log files when I installed the official RS. So, these rounded results are taken from my hand-written notes of the experience. Each line is a new RS run on the same drive.
Let's start with 32GB mSATA drive #2 for a "new" laptop build ...
Code:
0% 25% 50% 75% 100
115 145 211 211 209
124 146 211 211 209
124 145 211 211 209
125 146 211 211 209
125 146 211 211 209
Now, drive #3 ...
Code:
0 25% 50% 75% 100
108 134 210 211 207
109 135 210 211 208
110 136 210 211 208
110 136 210 211 208
Drive #1 ...
Code:
0 25% 50% 75% 100
121 143 211 211 208
121 142 211 211 208
121 142 211 211 208
Drive #4 ...
Code:
0 25% 50% 75% 100
101 133 210 208 208
107 133 210 208 208
107 133 210 208 208
The overall speed results were a little disappointing, but I guess still a lot faster than HDD speeds.
@Steve, do the above gradual improvements show some sort of drive self-healing?
Now for the mysterious results on the larger (and faster) 128GB drive which I use on my regular everyday laptop . I *do* have the logs for these tests, but it's easier to see the changes if I just tabulate the runs in order, one per line (and I'm just looking at only the first two columns) ...
Code:
0% 25%
419 540
368 490
327 499
432 544
312 497
386 538
372 500
What is going on here?? On a few of the runs, I had requested more details, so I went from my hand-written notes to the logs and found things like this ...
Code:
522.5 590.7 604.5 604.3 604.4
450.1 604.1 605.2 606.4 604.9
472.7 604.1 604.7 600.5 604.5
5.0 604.1 604.5 604.8 604.5
602.6 605.0 604.3 604.9
77.8 604.3 604.6 603.3 604.9
78.2 606.6 604.7 603.6 604.6
79.6 600.7 604.5 604.2 604.4
78.5 604.7 607.4 604.3 605.1
79.5 603.3 601.8 603.2 604.7
484.1 604.3 602.7 604.7 604.8
603.5 604.6 603.8 603.4 604.6
437.9 604.4 602.9 604.4 604.7
405.7 603.2 603.6 604.3 604.9
So, it seemed to me that maybe there were "bad spots" on the drive which were throwing out the average values because of the way RS handles that condition.
BTW,
@Steve, how *does* RS handle that condition?
Because this is a GPT drive, I cannot run SR on it ... so I though maybe CHKDSK would do a reasonable job of fixing it? Wrong!!
The RS results after running "chkdsk /b" on the drive in Windows 10 were worse ...
Code:
0% 25%
256 469
328 488
318 373
229 368
301 547
428 536
... but it does look like some self-healing occurred by the end of the last run. This is some of the detail from the start of the final run ...
Code:
Driv Size Drive Identity Location: 0 25% 50% 75% 100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81 120GB SSD128G 428.7 536.6 532.6 538.9 512.4
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
92.3 571.7 654.3 579.7 654.9
90.9 555.1 665.2 606.1 664.6
89.5 574.3 664.7 626.5 664.7
89.7 594.5 664.5 619.3 664.7
531.6 564.5 664.8 583.4 664.9
664.1 664.2 664.4 664.2 664.4
664.7 664.3 664.8 662.8 665.0
663.1 664.1 664.9 664.8 664.5
481.6 663.1 664.2 663.5 664.9
@Steve, to my eye, it looks like most of the 511 results in the final column, apart from the one bad spot I'm about to list, are around 660MB/s ... I don't understand why the average is presented as 512.4 (when I do the rough maths myself I get about 651MB/s for the average)? Here's the one bad spot from the 100% column ...
Code:
457.7 662.9 665.1 664.5 664.1
505.9 663.4 660.2 664.4 5.5
628.9 664.6 664.3 664.3
572.7 663.7 661.8 664.3 88.7
540.2 663.8 664.7 665.0 87.1
552.1 664.2 663.0 663.9 89.9
549.2 662.7 664.3 665.2 89.7
658.5 664.8 664.0 664.5 89.7
579.3 662.7 664.0 664.6 545.3
496.6 667.4 663.3 664.0 664.2
556.5 661.1 664.8 665.0 663.7
I will attach the log file of this final run, but have kept the others in case any interest in this topic is generated.
Cheers, Peter.
