A31 HD performance increase w/ Intel Application Accelerator

[Milos]

Hi,

I have an A31 with a Hitachi 7k100 (7200rpm, 100GB) hard drive. I installed the Intel Application Accelerator that was claimed here [http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... ccelerator,http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=24977] to provide a performance increase. I measured HD performance before and after and thought I'd share the results and invite comments.

Code: Select all

Before Intel Application Accelerator 2.2.2 (6 test repeats + stats):
                                                                   Mean  Stdev  Median
Sequential Writing (MB/s) : 25.73 20.47 23.39 25.98 25.04 25.84    24.4  2.2    25.39
Sequential Read    (MB/s) : 39.62 40.77 40.73 41.01 40.38 39.59    40.4  0.6    40.56
Buffered Writing   (MB/s) : 62.4  54.23 56.95 63.91 64.82 63.25    60.9  4.3    62.83
Buffered Reading   (MB/s) : 79.62 79.69 79.85 81.4  81.46 81.43    80.6  0.9    80.63
Random Reading     (MB/s) : 28    29    21    27    20    28       25.5  3.9    27.5

After Intel Application Accelerator 2.2.2 (14 test repeats + stats):
                                                                                                                   Mean  Stdev  Median
Sequential Writing (MB/s) : 26.3  21.32 25.52 25.89 22.97 21.16 23.02 27.07 26.23 27.19 26.54 26.99 27.58 26.76    25.3  2.2    26.27
Sequential Read    (MB/s) : 39.92 36.38 38.85 39.39 39.13 34.88 38.58 39.02 40.00 40.40 37.6  38.99 38.89 37.56    38.5  1.5    38.94
Buffered Writing   (MB/s) : 63.33 55.45 65.15 64.74 65.47 64.05 62.22 65.87 65.35 65.07 66.72 65.68 66.58 66.42    64.4  2.9    65.25
Buffered Reading   (MB/s) : 81.55 81.45 81.33 80.2  81.93 81.15 81.93 81.77 81.5  81.53 80.57 79.2  77.87 80.68    80.9  1.2    81.39
Random Reading     (MB/s) : 40    55    65    68    73    70    70    71    62    59    62    67    60    61       63.1  8.5    63.5
(opened various files/apps from HD after tests # 5,8,9,10 of 14 above, to clear any caches because the continuous increase in the first few steps of the "Random Read" test looked suspicious)

As you can see I repeated the "before" test 6 times, and the "after" test 14 times, and show the average, standard deviation and median. I also opened some applications between some tests as noted above to make sure there was no caching helping the next test with respect to the previous. My conclusion is that there's no significant difference in the first 4 tests (the speeds are equal to within the standard deviation), but there's over a factor of 2 increase in the "random read" with the IAA driver installed, i.e. a jump from 25 to 60 MB/s!

Can anyone comment on the significance/validity of this test?

Milos

P.S.
The test was done with PC Wizard 2006 (Version 1.691), and I installed the Intel Chipset Utility Software (v6.3.0), http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/inf/, before the Intel Application Accelerator 2.2.2 (latest version that supports i845MP/MZ chipset that is in my A31), http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/. (Note that I didn't do the "have disk" upgrade (http://support.intel.com/support/chipse ... s+infmain&) but installed straight, and there didn't seem to be a problem, even though there was a 2001 driver version installed already by the Thinkpad software.)