Decent RAID 0 monitoring software

Craig321

Craig321

Craig321

Soldato
Joined
2 May 2004
Posts
19,950
Hi,

I'm buying my RAID setup as soon as the hard drives I want come back in stock, hopefully Monday, so I'm just wondering if there are any decent tools to monitor the RAID array?

I assume, as Windows sees the array as one drive, it'll only report one SMART reading, one temperature reading etc.

For SMART: will Speedfan be able to give a report on both drives?
For temperature: Will Everest report both hard drives?
For space left: bit pointless, but is there anything that'll tell what how much space is left on each drive.

Is there any application that'll do all the above in a nice interface?

Also, another quick question about RAID: if I had a 32k stripe size and put a 1k file on there, would that file take up 32k?

Thanks,
Craig.
 
The 1k file would only be stored on one drive and take 1k afaik. I use like 4 or 8k stripe personally

Raid only reports one temp for me, I think that depends how you've connected it though.

You can always access the drives indivually through dos I'd think. If its raid 0 then the drives will have equal amounts of space left
 
Craig mate, Raid0 is nothing to worry about on modern drives, just install and forget it as most Smart Status for Raid0 wont be read by 3rd party apps like Speedfan etc.

If you stripe to 32K (16-32 is the norm) any files smaller than 32k will be held on 1 HDD only and not raided.

You can see a GUI of your Raid for likes of Silicon and Nvidia Controlers using their software, i aint sure on other controlers as not owned.
 
helmutcheese said:
Craig mate, Raid0 is nothing to worry about on modern drives, just install and forget it as most Smart Status for Raid0 wont be read by 3rd party apps like Speedfan etc.

If you stripe to 32K (16-32 is the norm) any files smaller than 32k will be held on 1 HDD only and not raided.

You can see a GUI of your Raid for likes of Silicon and Nvidia Controlers using their software, i aint sure on other controlers as not owned.
Click to expand...

True, I guess there's no need to monitor my SMART etc. as nothing ever important will be stored on the RAID array... I'm like that though, I like to monitor my hardware even if there's no need :p. You mentioned software made by the vendor? Is there ICH9R software? [EDIT] Found it, Matrix Storage controller :) - will download and see what it's like when I'm up and running with the array

Would I get any performance decrease in any case on a RAID0 array? e.g. if I had a 32k stripe size and read/wrote a 50GB file? Biggest file I'd have on the RAID array would be game files, so up to 2GB I guess.

Thanks,
Craig.
 
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Raid has higher latency as it involves more then one drive but is good for large single files. Any performance decrease is not noticable and its nice when it is faster
 
Hopefully RAID0 will also get rid of that horrible delay when running e.g. a 1GB+ single exe demo installer :) (still don't understand why some game manufacturers still release demos in single exe format... but anyway)

I think I'll go for the 32k stripe size... to start with anyway, on the array will just be WinXP or Vista and my program/game installs. Most DLLs/EXEs/files are larger than 64k, so should make things faster :)

Thanks for the help,
Craig.
 
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Set your Stripe to 16k or 32k, smaller is for fast benching and would need defragged every few days/1 week, and larger is for peeps who do video work, all my past Raid Controlers were 16k by default and could so 32k also.

The Nvidia ones seems to default to 128k which is a waste of time for all round everyday use (google good Raid0 guides and they all tell you 16k-32k is best as a allrounder).
 
Hmm,. interesting,. I am about to order a P35-DS3P and some of the 250 GB seagates to
set up 2 individual raid-0 arrays, (in the 6 port intel-matrix-raid), "source/destination" for
video works/rendering ONLY, how big stripes can I choose ? and what size would be best ?

thanks for any help :)
 
Running 1 Raid0 (2HDD's) to another seperate Raid0 (2HDD's) is super fast esp for video work as the Source VideoHDD and Finalized Video HDD will not be the same.

As for Stripe size well it will be no less than 64k but I would imagine 128k-256k, but best Google good Raid0 guides that point to more along video work.
 
I know, and thank you :)

But everyone keeps saying 16-32k... would 16 or 32 benefit me more, or would they give they same/similar performance increase?
 
If you run Windows normally, Game, surf, encode odd videos/mp3's, etc then 16k-32k is best.

If you encode Video all day every day then go well bigger and bigger than 64k IMO.

And if you want a bigger E-Pean then make it 4K and get higher scores in benches like HD-Tune and have to defrag your HDD very, very often.
 
helmutcheese said:
And if you want a bigger E-Pean then make it 4K and get higher scores in benches like HD-Tune and have to defrag your HDD very, very often.
Click to expand...

but that wont matter if you have diskeeper running in smartmode. as soon as you walk away from you computer it start to defrag automatically.
 
Cant Raid0 for now as of HDD cage and 8800Ultra (too long so cage needs modded) it was set to 16k on last mobo as that was default, and it only allowed 16k ot 32k anyhow.
 
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