2 or 3 raptors?

arfur · 31 Jan 2007 at 17:01

Kaiju said:
Burst means nothing mate and those average reads aren't looking too great.

You should expect around 130MB reads for 2x 7200.10 in RAID0.

Kaiju, what board are you using?

Kaiju · 31 Jan 2007 at 17:28

arfur said:
Kaiju, what board are you using?

I took the screenie from a thread in the Hard Drive forum.

Link to Thread

The guy in question, Jaap74 (Page 2) increases his sustained transfer rate by 10MB or so by messing with jumpers I think. I just got a WD500GBKS, but still not sure when people mention it, whether to take the default jumper off or not for the performance increase.

cavemanoc · 31 Jan 2007 at 21:52

Those are some seriously quick transfer speeds - you sure he doesn't have a high end PCI-e controller card on there - only just behind my Cheetahs!

Oh yeah...

Dr_Evil said:
Let's put it this way - with 2 Raptors (36 or 74Gb) 16Mb in RAID 0, XP is ready to use in under half a minute, and you are ALWAYS the 1st person spawning on the battlefield!!!

Cough cough... I think not!

phill9800 · 31 Jan 2007 at 21:56

Kaiju said:
I took the screenie from a thread in the Hard Drive forum.

Link to Thread

The guy in question, Jaap74 (Page 2) increases his sustained transfer rate by 10MB or so by messing with jumpers I think. I just got a WD500GBKS, but still not sure when people mention it, whether to take the default jumper off or not for the performance increase.

I've no jumpers on my WD5000AAKS drive.. Should I have??

Kaiju · 31 Jan 2007 at 22:03

phill9800 said:
I've no jumpers on my WD5000AAKS drive.. Should I have??

Just got confirmation that if you keep the default jumper in, it'll make your drive SATA I. Take it out and you're on SATA II. No jumpers is the way to go.

arfur · 31 Jan 2007 at 22:07

I didnt think the jumpers really made a difference to speed as the drives arent capable of reaching 150Mb/s anyway let alone 300...

arfur · 1 Feb 2007 at 12:02

just another update, I downloaded a Intel app from http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scr...All&OSFullName=All Operating Systems&lang=eng

and installed it, I right clicked on the array and noticed that writeback cache was disabled, I enabled it and my burst has now gone up to 1.1Gb/s and average is 125mb/s... it still doesnt seem right though as the disks never breach 140Mb/s, do you think it could be the controller dropping the speed down to 150Mb/s when RAID is enabled (AHCI is disabled automatically when RAID is enabled)?

phill9800 · 1 Feb 2007 at 17:57

Kaiju said:
Just got confirmation that if you keep the default jumper in, it'll make your drive SATA I. Take it out and you're on SATA II. No jumpers is the way to go.

So my results in raid are ok? As I have a few people telling me otherwise...

WoZZeR · 1 Feb 2007 at 18:34

Hello Chaps, having 2 Raptors and reading this thread I thought I'd post my HDTach results.

I am a complete novice so they are running in 128K stripes on Raid 0, feel free to offer tips.

PC is Shuttle SD37P2, Intel Raid, 2 Raptor 150's, CPU E6700.

Nelly · 1 Feb 2007 at 18:50

Why not buy just one 150GB Raptor? its much much quiter than the 74GB Raptor, speaking from my own experiance. . . .

rpstewart · 1 Feb 2007 at 20:32

WoZZeR said:
I am a complete novice so they are running in 128K stripes on Raid 0, feel free to offer tips.

The 128K stripe size is probably going to hurt your benchmark scores but will give better real world performance if you're reading or writing a lot of larger files. Unfortunately the only way of changing the strip size is to recreate the array which wipes all the contents.

Nelly said:
Why not buy just one 150GB Raptor? its much much quiter than the 74GB Raptor, speaking from my own experiance. . . .

Two of any current disk in RAID0 will be quicker than a single 150Gb Raptor though.

Nelly · 1 Feb 2007 at 20:41

rpstewart said:
The 128K stripe size is probably going to hurt your benchmark scores but will give better real world performance if you're reading or writing a lot of larger files. Unfortunately the only way of changing the strip size is to recreate the array which wipes all the contents.

Two of any current disk in RAID0 will be quicker than a single 150Gb Raptor though.

Fair enough, whats the chances of Raid failiure these days? is it very rare now? I guess raid technology has moved on in the last 5+ years.

rpstewart · 1 Feb 2007 at 20:57

It's maybe a bit better but it's difficult to quantify. Most folk assume that RAID sets fail because a drive has died whereas most of the array failures I've encountered have been hiccups where a drive maybe hasn't responded in time and the controller has been unable to cope. Unfortunately the data was lost in each case but there was nothing wrong with the hardware and I was able to carry on and restore from backups.

WoZZeR · 1 Feb 2007 at 21:28

Originally Posted by rpstewart
The 128K stripe size is probably going to hurt your benchmark scores but will give better real world performance if you're reading or writing a lot of larger files. Unfortunately the only way of changing the strip size is to recreate the array which wipes all the contents.

Ta for that, I'll probably leave the stripe size or maybe on next install reduce to 64K, I'm pretty happy with them.

I do a backup of files once a week just in case but WD drives have been my favourites since Mode 4 was invented.... and I've still got that 3GB baby in a cupboard.

Regarding the original post, I originally had them in mirroring and the delays in Oblivion were sizable, Oblivion barely stutters now, smooth as anything.

Heartily recommend the Raptors, and WD have a good RMA service too.

phill9800 · 3 Feb 2007 at 23:54

arfur said:
just another update, I downloaded a Intel app from http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scr...All&OSFullName=All Operating Systems&lang=eng

and installed it, I right clicked on the array and noticed that writeback cache was disabled, I enabled it and my burst has now gone up to 1.1Gb/s and average is 125mb/s... it still doesnt seem right though as the disks never breach 140Mb/s, do you think it could be the controller dropping the speed down to 150Mb/s when RAID is enabled (AHCI is disabled automatically when RAID is enabled)?

Is this just a simple download and install for a bit more performance? Raid using the two 500Gb WD drives I bought that where on offer, didnt come out too hot I thought... Burst of a 140Mb/sec and a sustained rate of about 115mb/sec... Random access time was about 13ms...

arfur · 4 Feb 2007 at 23:41

ok, now i'm confused ans annoyed...I managed to screw up my mobo bios last night so I ended up getting a new board today, I got the Asus P5N32SLI-plus board which has got a Nvidia RAID controller. I have built up XP on the 3 disk RAID 0 array (3 barracuda 7200.10's) with the latest drivers but HD Tach still only shows 115Mb/s, I thought it could have been the Intel RAID controller on the Gigabyte but I dont think it was. Individually the drives get 65Mb/s each.

rpstewart · 5 Feb 2007 at 09:07

Have you disabled the read caching on the RAID controllers in Device Manager?

Dr_Evil · 5 Feb 2007 at 09:40

rpstewart said:
Have you disabled the read caching on the RAID controllers in Device Manager?

How do you do this exactly on an NVidia motherboard-integrated RAID controller?

rpstewart · 5 Feb 2007 at 09:54

Go into Device Manager and expand the SCSI & RAID Controllers section. There should be one or two (depending on how your BIOS and drives are configured) entries for the NVidia SATA controllers, right click on each and pick properties. There should be a tab for each of the two SATA channels on the property page, go into each in turn and uncheck the Enable Read Caching box.

arfur · 5 Feb 2007 at 10:02

done this and some settings dont make any difference (forcing it to use 1g SATA or 2g SATA) and some make it worse like turning off the cache.

I noticed that when I forced it to 1G 1.5Gb/s the read score stayed the same but the burst went down so its like it cant read faster than 1G