What's wrong with my RAID 0 setup? (2 x ST3250410AS)

RC21 · 15 Oct 2007 at 22:29

What's wrong with my RAID 0 setup?

I've got 2 x Seagate 7200.10 in RAID 0 (ST3250410AS) The 250MB Single platter drives. One on it's own should do about 80-90 MB/s. I was expecting 160MB/s out of them but i'm getting about 120MB/s......any ideas?

I've taken the (thingy) dongle? out of the back of the drive so it's 300Mb/s

Any ideas?

Thanks
RC

rpstewart · 15 Oct 2007 at 22:40

Turn the Write Back Caching on in the Matrix Storage Manager, should make a reasonable difference.

balls · 16 Oct 2007 at 09:11

rpstewart said:
Turn the Write Back Caching on in the Matrix Storage Manager, should make a reasonable difference.

Just did that on my drives, has made a huge difference, especially with large drive numbers

randal · 16 Oct 2007 at 09:25

Wow, wtf is wrong with my setup. Think I'm getting 250ish on mine... lame.

RC21 · 16 Oct 2007 at 09:53

randal24 said:
Wow, wtf is wrong with my setup. Think I'm getting 250ish on mine... lame.

Any ideas what settings I may have missed?

rpstewart said:
Turn the Write Back Caching on in the Matrix Storage Manager, should make a reasonable difference.

I'll give it a shot - is the setting in bios, the raid config (that pops up after the bios screen disappears) or in Vista?

Thanks
RC

rpstewart · 16 Oct 2007 at 09:55

RC21 said:
I'll give it a shot - is the setting in bios, the raid config (that pops up after the bios screen disappears) or in Vista?

It's in the Intel Matrix Storage Console within Windows, off the top of my head I can't remember if it's just a case of right clicking on the appropriate bit of the second screenshot or if it's buried in the menus.

RC21 · 16 Oct 2007 at 10:54

rpstewart said:
It's in the Intel Matrix Storage Console within Windows, off the top of my head I can't remember if it's just a case of right clicking on the appropriate bit of the second screenshot or if it's buried in the menus.

Thanks, when i get home from work i'll give it a shot.
Thanks again
RC

Participant · 16 Oct 2007 at 11:55

rpstewart said:
Turn the Write Back Caching on in the Matrix Storage Manager, should make a reasonable difference.

When I did this I got a RAID array failure message from the IMSM. My heart skipped a few beats but I disabled this again and everything was normal.

RC21 · 16 Oct 2007 at 12:26

Robbie G said:
When I did this I got a RAID array failure message from the IMSM. My heart skipped a few beats but I disabled this again and everything was normal.

Eeekkk!

snowdog · 16 Oct 2007 at 14:41

Think I'm getting 250ish on mine...

Dream on, that's burst.
250 on 2 drives is impossible.

Results look just a tad slow to me but not much.
I'm getting 124.
Your random acces seems high, mine is 13.3 ms.

Dutch Guy · 16 Oct 2007 at 15:56

Maybe your 128kb stripe size has an influence on the speed?
I think that when benchmarking the smaller the stripe size the faster the drive is.

RC21 · 16 Oct 2007 at 16:10

Dutch Guy said:
Maybe your 128kb stripe size has an influence on the speed?
I think that when benchmarking the smaller the stripe size the faster the drive is.

Should I image it, change the stripe size to 64 and put the image back on?

RC21 · 16 Oct 2007 at 20:53

I turned the Write-Back cache on

Quick Bench (8MB):

Long Bench (32MB)

How does this look?
Are the dips anything to worry about?

Thanks for all you help.
RC

rpstewart · 16 Oct 2007 at 21:40

RC21 said:
How does this look?
Are the dips anything to worry about?

That's more like it.

The dips I wouldn't worry too much about, they're just when other processes have accessed the disks.

jbloggs · 16 Oct 2007 at 22:06

That long bench is really pretty sweet!

Mr Jack · 16 Oct 2007 at 22:48

I think something else was running in the background during your first bench.

Massive Attack · 18 Oct 2007 at 14:40

sorry for the hijacking but how do you get that intel matrix storage console?

Camalot · 18 Oct 2007 at 17:36

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-138-SE&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=768

Is that your hard drive?

Im looking for a new one.

My current one is a 160gb western digital caviar

Burst 204mb/s
random access 13.2
average read 56

Scoobie Dave · 18 Oct 2007 at 18:47

snowdog said:
Dream on, that's burst.
250 on 2 drives is impossible.

Not with 3 it's not

RC21 · 19 Oct 2007 at 14:06

Massive Attack said:
sorry for the hijacking but how do you get that intel matrix storage console?

It's a program I downloaded from my motherboards (Gigabyte's) website but imagine it'll work on any Intel raid setup

a quick Google:
http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/