As the topic title says, if I get better hardware like say a quad over a dual core and say 4gb ram over 2gb will pre clearing drives go any faster? Thanks for any help.

As the topic title says, if I get better hardware like say a quad over a dual core and say 4gb ram over 2gb will pre clearing drives go any faster? Thanks for any help.

 

A little (the ram will help more than a CPU upgrade) but I don't think you will be able to really notice and significant improvement.

As the topic title says, if I get better hardware like say a quad over a dual core and say 4gb ram over 2gb will pre clearing drives go any faster? Thanks for any help.

I'll be surprised it it makes much of a difference at all.  The limitation is basically how fast the disk can be read and written with a given disk controller.

More RAM will allow more concurrent pre-clears but speed is limited by disk speed and then, with enough concurrent pre-clears, system bus. The speed of a single pre-clear is limited by disk speed and changing the other hardware will have no effect. The speed of enough concurrent pre-clears are limited by the bus and upgrading the processor will increase bus speed improving the speed of concurrent pre-clears. The number of concurrent pre-clears that saturates your current bus can be determined by preforming repeated tests and increasing the number of disks one at a time until the speed drops.

As the topic title says, if I get better hardware like say a quad over a dual core and say 4gb ram over 2gb will pre clearing drives go any faster? Thanks for any help.

 

With these upgrade choices, highly unlikely, yet it could slightly, (more ram, more buffer).

The bottleneck is the drive and the system bus.

 

Now if you spread the load onto multiple bus's and controllers, that will help each preclear run as fast as it can.

But it's still limited by the speed of a drive. Typically 80-120MB/s

 

A PCIe X1 is capable of 256MB/s in one direction.

So if you were preclearing more then 2 drives on one lane you would have contention.

 

Motherboard I/O chipsets are usually limited to around 384MB/s or so (could be dated).

So more then 3 preclears here, will have contention.. but then you also have contention with other communication that goes through the channels.  typically the motherboard I/O chipset pathway is shared with PCI. video, and other peripherals.

 

Look at your motherboard block diagram to see how it is designed.

 

If each drive were on it's own controller and it's own PCIe X1 or X? lane, then they would run at full speed.

It's I/O bound. so a  faster CPU "may help" if you are doing allot of these preclears simultaneously.

But only if it improves upon the bus speed.

 

Your drive speed is still limited no matter what.

Your controller speed is still limited no matter what.

The Pathway is still a constant also.

 

The trick is to use as many high speed pathways as possible.

Frontside bus speeds and a typical layout is shown here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front-side_bus

That's an old block diagram in days of PCI and AGP.

 

The one here shows a more modern example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_X58

 

 

However, it also depends on your board and class of board.

For some server class boards, the PCIe slots are connected at a different level.

 

For example on my Supermicro X7SBA, some of the PCIe slots are connected directly to the 3210 Memory controller hub yielding a very high performance.

 

 

You can download the manual and look at the block diagram around page 1-8 or so.

http://www.orbitmicro.com/download/resources/X7SBA-Manual.pdf

 

Keep in mind this is an older specialized server class board. Most modern motherboard manuals have some form of block diagram showing how things are laid out.

 

Ok so from reading what you guys have said, avoid a 800 FSB, aim for a 1066 or go for a 1333 FSB for the best speed. And to slightly upgrade the ram will help so I  think I'll get a cheap 8GB kit of that for this.

 

Just wanted to know about how long pre clearing takes as I've seen some posts say it can take takes and some say it can take a few hours but I would like to get my server set up and filled ASAP.

If you plan on regularly preclearing a bunch of drives then building out your system for this makes sense. Otherwise not so much.

 

Remember that in the best of cases, preclearing a single large drive will take quite a few hours. Assuming the system isn't ancient it'll be faster than any spinning disk. That leaves the drive's read/write speed as the bottleneck.

 

At 200MB/s (generous) a 2TB drive would still take 10000 seconds or 166 minutes for a single pass. One preclear means multiple passes.

 

The quickest way to get the drives ready is to start preclearing asap using a different system.

I would also suggest multiple PCIe controllers and doing multiple preclears, but scheduling them to run on different controllers and different buses.

I did a preclear on a 2TB drive recently and it took over 12 hours per pass.