Overview

Seagate Cheetah SCSI disks in various forms. How well will they perform on NTFS 5.0 and FAT32?

Test system

ASUS CUSL2 motherboard
Intel Pentium III 700E
Adaptec 29160 U160-SCSI card
Windows 2000 Pro SP1

Result

Running this performance test, we used an own developed benchmark program. This program will measure the raw copying speed of the OS. The program is using the FileSystemObject in Windows Scripting Host. The sequence of the program can be explained as follows:

CreateObject (Filesystemobject)
Time=0
Filesystemobject.copyfile Source, Destination
GetNewTime
Delete DestinationFile

2 different files where used. 1: 1GB .vob 2: 15MB .mp3

Looking at the chart above, we see that NTFS 5.0 (NTFS) is using more overhead than FAT32 (FAT). This will become painfully obvious with small files.

Writing to the SCSI-III disk is not even close to the speeds of the fastest disk in this test.

Whenever writing to the disk with 16MB cache, we get a great transfer speed.
Why it is possible to get a transfer rate higher than 40MB/s is very surprising. The read disk should only be able to handle 40MB/s.

The source disk is constantly waiting for the destination disk. I.e. Pretty bad transfer rate.

At first glance it looks like the U160 disk waiting for the slow SCSI-III disk. If we would replace the 4MB cache with 16MB, we would get the transfer rate as shown 2 charts above. Quite some difference for small files.

Situation in most games: Reading and writing small files to the same disk. Get the disk with most cache to be your gaming disk (and OS disk?). Also, don't use NTFS on your gaming disk (or partition).

Reading and writing to the same disk. Lots of physical movement for the read/write arm inside the disk.

Conclusion

The more cache on the HD, the better/faster the games (and OS) will work. Price/Performance is an interesting factor here.
Put your games on the HD with the largest cache, and keep it on FAT32.

This test does not show any of the other aspects (like security) between the two file systems. This is purely a benchmark.

A factor not shown in this test is the seek time. The smaller disk (physically), combined with big capacity and U160 SCSI will give you an astonishing read/write time. Perhaps we will get back to this in a later test.

-- © Grönis 2000-08-23