Will SR take advantage of a faster CPU?

[mappo]

I'm planning to set up a dedicated PC for SpinRite. Still in the design-phase, I have some questions:

• How CPU-intensive is SR? Will it be faster with a faster CPU, or will the drive always be the limiting factor?
• What about threads? Should I go for more threads or higher speed single-thread?
• Does it have to be a 64-bit system?
• Does more RAM equal more better?
• Will BIOS booting continue to work past v.6 or should I go for a mainboard with UEFI?

I'm tempted to dust off an old P4 system I have. It's only 32-bit (so no more than 3-ish GB of RAM) and single-thread (but close to 3 GHz). It's also BIOS only.
Looking forward to hear from the elder geeks.

 

[PHolder]

@Steve already has a recommendation explicitly for this, and it's quite cost effective. The recommendation is for a SoC type PC that he has been using for SpinRite development. The cheapest model with 2G of RAM is plenty for this purpose. https://www.zimaboard.com/ Make sure you order the extra "SATA Y-Cable for ZimaBoard" if that is something you would use. ( https://shop.zimaboard.com/en-ca/pr...-5-inch-hdd-3-5-inch-hdd-raid-free-nas-unraid )

 

[PHolder]

In answer to your actual questions:

How CPU-intensive is SR?

Not really at all. An old 286 (AT class IBM PC, 10 MHz level) would probably be fine, except it would be missing some of the 386 class instructions needed for modern SpinRite.

What about threads?

It's strictly single threaded.

Does it have to be a 64-bit system?

No, but if it's new, it's probably better that it is for the future as even Linux us dropping some support for older 32bit machines.

Does more RAM equal more better?

No, a single gigabyte is sufficient, but again, the future is more, so 2G is probably sufficient for anything in the near future. (Good luck finding a new PC with less than 4G or even 8G of RAM though, other than in the recommended system, in previous post.)

Will BIOS booting continue to work past v.6 or should I go for a mainboard with UEFI?

Steve has committed to V7 still supporting legacy booting, but he doesn't really have control over the future of PCs. Intel has deprecated legacy booting since 2020, so it's getting more difficult to get a new machine that has the necessary CSM to support it.

 

[Paul F]

The limitation on your P4 may be the SATA speed. I have a motherboard that supports SATA-3. As a rough guide: for a 1TB hard drive, it scans a SATA-3 HD in ~2 hrs. a SATA-2 HD in ~3hrs, and a SATA-1 HD in ~4hrs.

SR6.1 will not run on a UEFI-only motherboard.

 

[Paul F]

If you can get your P4 system up and running without spending any money, then certainly try it first.

 

[mappo]

The limitation on your P4 may be the SATA speed. I have a motherboard that supports SATA-3. As a rough guide: for a 1TB hard drive, it scans a SATA-3 HD in ~2 hrs. a SATA-2 HD in ~3hrs, and a SATA-1 HD in ~4hrs.

SR6.1 will not run on a UEFI-only motherboard.

The slowness of the SATA might be an issue, but I consider this to be an overnight procedure anyway. Thank you for your input!

 

[Steve]

The only thing I would add is about the somewhat unknown future of SpinRite. If your goal is to create a dedicated SpinRite 6.1 system, then everything said above was 100% on the money. But I have big plans for SpinRite 7+ and I would be less certain that things like multiple cores and an excess of RAM and many more drive interfaces might not be useful. My biggest concern is over total memory system bandwidth, since I expect that might be stretched thin. But there, more caching would not help. Only faster main memory with wider paths.

The next SpinRite will be inherently multitasking and will be able to run on any number of drives at once. It will also be VERY busy doing other things, with a lot going on at once. I don't yet have any calibration on any of this. And in the worst case, a lesser capable machine might (and it's only a "might") prevent SpinRite from doing as much at once. But I'm also certain that the lower-end ZimaBoard will have plenty of power either way... though it might (and, again, I just don't know yet) limit how many drives can be kept busy at once, or how deeply many drives can be monitored.

 

[ColbyBouma]

Level 4 and 5 do a verification pass that might get bottlenecked on something as old as a Pentium 4, but I don't know if anyone has benchmarked that yet.

 

[hesdeadjim]

The limitation on your P4 may be the SATA speed. I have a motherboard that supports SATA-3. As a rough guide: for a 1TB hard drive, it scans a SATA-3 HD in ~2 hrs. a SATA-2 HD in ~3hrs, and a SATA-1 HD in ~4hrs.

SR6.1 will not run on a UEFI-only motherboard.

hi i know this thread is a year old but i didnt want to make a duplicate. what level do you have spinrite set to? a 1tb at level 5 takes days for me. thanks

 

[hesdeadjim]

Level 4 and 5 do a verification pass that might get bottlenecked on something as old as a Pentium 4, but I don't know if anyone has benchmarked that yet.

i think that may be my problem. i use level 5 for everything and anything over 1tb takes days. 4tb takes almost 2 weeks

 

[ColbyBouma]

i think that may be my problem. i use level 5 for everything and anything over 1tb takes days. 4tb takes almost 2 weeks

I checked my logs, and found 3 1 TB drives that I scanned at Level 5. The fastest one took 10 hours, the slowest took 16. They are all 7200 RPM. A 6 TB 5400 RPM SMR drive took 4 days.

It sounds like you have a bottleneck somewhere. Would you be willing to share your logs? I recommending putting them in a ZIP file before uploading them here.

Also, are you using a Pentium 4?

 

[hesdeadjim]

I checked my logs, and found 3 1 TB drives that I scanned at Level 5. The fastest one took 10 hours, the slowest took 16. They are all 7200 RPM. A 6 TB 5400 RPM SMR drive took 4 days.

It sounds like you have a bottleneck somewhere. Would you be willing to share your logs? I recommending putting them in a ZIP file before uploading them here.

Also, are you using a Pentium 4?

thanks for the info. my current temp system for drive checking is pentium 4 dual core with 8gb ram. (my old mobo died) this motherboard has a 2tb limit so i will need to update it but i am getting 4 hours for a 250gb drive on level 5. how do i save the logs? thanks

 

[ColbyBouma]

how do i save the logs?

They are in the SRLOGS folder on your SpinRite boot drive.

this motherboard has a 2tb limit

That should only apply to BIOS drives. As long as you connect them to SATA, SpinRite 6.1 should be able to operate on drives of any size.

 

[SeanBZA]

Will bet the motherboard is IO limited, most likely bottleneck is the SATA controller itself. you probably want to get a new board, or plug the drives into the second ad higher SATA ports, a well known bug from older Intel controllers that SATA0 is generally, due to the asctual IC itself, slower and thus will not run at full 3G speed. Also replace the SATA cables, there are some older ones that are non conforming, and limit drive interface speed.

Generally a P4 will be fast enough, though SR6.1 will only run on a single core as a DOS application. The limiting factor there with anything over 2GHz core speed is the memory and IO bandwidth, if you have 8G of RAM, make sure it fills all slots, so that the memory controller can interleave the memory, getting best speed out of it.

 

[Paul F]

hi i know this thread is a year old but i didnt want to make a duplicate. what level do you have spinrite set to? a 1tb at level 5 takes days for me. thanks

I got those times using SpinRite's default level 2 on good drives that did not invoke DynaStat.

 

[Tazz]

I'm currently running a SpinRite level 5 on a WD Blue 2TB 5400 RPM. I have a few of them.
The first one took 28 hours and this one is looking like it'll be 30ish hours. No Dynastat work ... yet.

The testing platform is a Zimablade.

 

[hesdeadjim]

t

They are in the SRLOGS folder on your SpinRite boot drive.


That should only apply to BIOS drives. As long as you connect them to SATA, SpinRite 6.1 should be able to operate on drives of any

 

[millQ]

1TB SAMSUNG HD103SJ and INTEL I7 CPU @level3
| time: 0:00:00 5:04:39 | : processed | U unrecovered |

vs
other 1TB SAMSUNG HD103SJ and slower AMD CPU Athlon II X2 250 @level3
| time: 0:00:00 5:05:50 | : processed | U unrecovered |

~71 seconds difference

 

[AlanD]

1TB SAMSUNG HD103SJ and INTEL I7 CPU @level3
| time: 0:00:00 5:04:39 | : processed | U unrecovered |

vs
other 1TB SAMSUNG HD103SJ and slower AMD CPU Athlon II X2 250 @level3
| time: 0:00:00 5:05:50 | : processed | U unrecovered |

~71 seconds difference

But does the machine with the Athlon have SATA III? or is it limited to SATA II speeds?

 

[millQ]

But does the machine with the Athlon have SATA III? or is it limited to SATA II speeds?

Athlon is limited to SATA II speeds, but the Samsung HD is not that fast.

  +==========================================================================+
  |                   Drive's Current Measured Performance                   |
  |--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                             SAMSUNG HD103SJ                              |
  |                             S246J9AZB02141                               |
  |--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                    smart polling delay: 603.756 msec                     |
  |                    random sectors time:  13.953 msec                     |
  |                    front of drive rate: 144.932 MB/s                     |
  |                    midpoint drive rate: 123.648 MB/s                     |
  |                      end of drive rate:  76.990 MB/s                     |
  +==========================================================================+