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For those wondering the performance of an external USB 2.0 drive, here is mine:
Drive: External USB 2.0 Western Digital 160GB WD1600BB-55GUC0
Sequential Read Peak: 33 MB/s
Burst Speed: 33.0 MB/s
Average read: 32.1 MB/s
CPU Utilisation: 8% (+/- 2%)
Random Access: 20.4ms
As you can see, an external USB drive is severely limited by the USB bus. The USB bus is 33MB, so that's the fastest the reads/writes can go.
Edit: I thought it would be interesting to see what different RAM timings meant for harddrive performance. My RAM timings are normally 2-3-2-5-1T, so I loosened them to 3-4-4-8-1T, which is the same or worse than value-RAM. Did the test on my Internal Maxtor 200GB IDE with about 54GB space used:
(Timings of 2-3-2-5)
Sequential Read Peak: 68 MB/s
Burst Speed: 121.3 MB/s
Average read: 52.9 MB/s
CPU Utilisation: 3% (+/- 2%)
Random Access: 15.1ms
(Timings of 3-4-4-8; set through BIOS)
Sequential Read Peak: 67.5 MB/s
Burst Speed: 121.2 MB/s
Average read: 53.5 MB/s
CPU Utilisation: 2% (+/- 2%)
Random Access: 16.1ms
I don't know how accurate this is without actually testing actual value-RAM, as my memory is very high quality, so even loosened RAM timings might not be as much of a performance drop as actual value-RAM.
Interesting... There doesn't seem to be any performance difference with different RAM timings; I guess RAM timings are like overclocking: doesn't seem to do anything for harddrive performance.
Last edited by Ralck : 08-28-2006 at 08:38 PM.
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