decent raid card

pan07 · 14 Sep 2009 at 15:47

please can anyone recommend me a decent raid card.
my setup at moment,
2 velociraptors in raid 0 on a adaptec 1430a controller,
4 wd greens on 2x raid 0 arrays on a rocket raid 230x card.
basically i'm wanting to burn 2 to 3 images off any one of these drives at any one time and at the moment i am getting buffering at anything above 4x speed.
previously i had my raptors setup on my motherboard raid and the peformance was far superior.
so looking for a really quick raid card that i can put my 4 greens on and will put raptors back on board
thanks in advance for any help.
oh and under £250 if possible

rpstewart · 14 Sep 2009 at 16:14

I think you're running into bus bandwidth problems more than anything. How are all the cards and burners connected to the system?

pan07 · 14 Sep 2009 at 18:03

thanks for the reply.
i had the raptors connected to the pciexp3 slot wich is only8x,
connected them to pciexp2 and there seems to be an improvment,still gonna switch these back to the onboard raid.
the burners are all connected to the on board sata.
would an expensive raid card make a difference to the wd greens as the rocket raid has always struggled burning 2 or more images above 4x speed. got this connected to the pcie1 slot.

tuppers360 · 16 Sep 2009 at 14:33

Would love to see how you will do this was considering getting a card of my own!

rpstewart · 16 Sep 2009 at 15:33

pan07 said:
basically i'm wanting to burn 2 to 3 images off any one of these drives at any one time and at the moment i am getting buffering at anything above 4x speed.

I've just re-read this and I'm a bit unclear on this bit. Are you wanting to burn 2 or 3 different images stored on the same array at the same time?

Zarf · 16 Sep 2009 at 19:29

pan07 said:
thanks for the reply.
i had the raptors connected to the pciexp3 slot wich is only8x,
connected them to pciexp2 and there seems to be an improvment,still gonna switch these back to the onboard raid.
the burners are all connected to the on board sata.
would an expensive raid card make a difference to the wd greens as the rocket raid has always struggled burning 2 or more images above 4x speed. got this connected to the pcie1 slot.

It's not the RAID cards, they have plenty of raw bandwidth. You're just running into limitations with Mechanical drives, speeds will always drop dramatically whenever you try and multitask from a single drive or array.
Either have three seperate arrays with the same data, or use Solid State Drives (which work fine multitasking. A single SSD could probably support 10 burns simultaniously, and would scale almost linearly in RAID0, so two SSD's could probably support 20 burns ! )

A 16x burn requires 21MB/s throughput, so 4x requires 5.25MB/s which gives you some idea just how much mechanical drives suck at multitasking, since sequentially (streaming one file) your wd greens can probably average 180MB/s, but are obviously managing less than 11MB/s when they need to multitask. Your PCI-E x1 slot isn't a limiting factor here as that has 250MB/s of bandwidth.

pan07 · 17 Sep 2009 at 15:08

rpstewart said:
I've just re-read this and I'm a bit unclear on this bit. Are you wanting to burn 2 or 3 different images stored on the same array at the same time?

yes correct i have managed this (3 different burns at 8x) with my raptors on my motherboard but not with the adaptec raid card.

pan07 · 17 Sep 2009 at 15:13

Zarf said:
It's not the RAID cards, they have plenty of raw bandwidth. You're just running into limitations with Mechanical drives, speeds will always drop dramatically whenever you try and multitask from a single drive or array.
Either have three seperate arrays with the same data, or use Solid State Drives (which work fine multitasking. A single SSD could probably support 10 burns simultaniously, and would scale almost linearly in RAID0, so two SSD's could probably support 20 burns ! )

A 16x burn requires 21MB/s throughput, so 4x requires 5.25MB/s which gives you some idea just how much mechanical drives suck at multitasking, since sequentially (streaming one file) your wd greens can probably average 180MB/s, but are obviously managing less than 11MB/s when they need to multitask. Your PCI-E x1 slot isn't a limiting factor here as that has 250MB/s of bandwidth.

so its a limitation of the hard rives?
solid state too dear and not enough storage space at the moment .
would i get better results splitting the greens, 2 on my rocket raid and 2 on my adaptec

Zarf · 18 Sep 2009 at 00:48

pan07 said:
so its a limitation of the hard rives?
solid state too dear and not enough storage space at the moment .
would i get better results splitting the greens, 2 on my rocket raid and 2 on my adaptec

It wouldn't make any difference which RAID controller the drives are on, they both have plenty of spare bandwidth.
The problem is that the drives can't work on two or more things at once very effectively, and RAID doesn't help a great deal with this.
So if you want to burn three dvd's at once you either get an SSD (For the £250 you had allocated you can get a 128GB SSD to put your images on), or you copy the image onto three different drives (or arrays) so each array only has to read one file at a time, so one iso on your raptors, and one on each of your wdgreen arrays.

Say you have a mechanical drive that can read one file at 90MB/s. if you try and read two files at the same time, instead of getting 45MB/s on each you get more like 4.5MB/s. Putting two drives in RAID0 helps by doubling speeds but you're still only getting around 9MB/s at best - which is why you're finding you can't burn two files at once.

Seriously, an SSD is probably your best bet, even if you just get a small one and use it as a scratch disk - it'll only take a couple of minutes copying the Isos you want to burn onto it first.

If you don't want to do any of this, your only other option is to make a massive RAID0 or RAID5 array of disks, like 7 or 8 drives to get the speed whilst multitasking up enough.

You can see what i'm saying for yourself, set an iso copying from your wdgreens onto your desktop, look at the speed you're getting (probably over 160MB/s) then set another copying from the wdgreens onto your desktop and see what happens to your transfer speeds.

pan07 · 18 Sep 2009 at 01:43

thanks zarf much appreciated, saved me wasting more money on an expensive raid card.
the only problem i have with what u say is the fact the raptors perform far far better with the onboard raid than the adaptec, so much so that as soon as i have time gonna have to format and switch them back to onboard.
but once again thanks, gonna save me money and get ssd next year hopefully with an i7

Zarf · 18 Sep 2009 at 02:44

I couldn't tell you why the raptors are better with onboard RAID0 than the adaptec RAID0, if its a 1430SA, it's a pretty decent card and should be the equal of onboard.
Only thing that comes to mind is enabling write back cache, it might be called "performance mode" on Adaptecs.

Can you run a crystaldisk benchmark on the adaptec RAID0 raptors and post the results?

pan07 · 18 Sep 2009 at 14:45

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 194.001 MB/s
Sequential Write : 90.930 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 57.480 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 48.690 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.992 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.675 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/09/18 14:32:32

this what you need

Fahim · 18 Sep 2009 at 16:32

I just bought myself an Adaptec 1430SA RAID, and it was causing BSODs and boot delays. I managed to fix it later on, but it was slower than my PCI Promise card, so i send it back for a refund. My onboard controller is much faster.

And adaptec has a long list of hard drives which are incompatible and seagate 1.5tb and some wd 500-750gb was some of them.

When I burn multiple images, i usually burn from different drives to different burners. same goes for encoding and others, performance is always so much better when the source and destination is different.

Zarf · 18 Sep 2009 at 20:11

Thanks Pan, nothing really stands out as an issue there, the write speeds look a little lower than i'd expect for RAID0 Velocirators but nothing terrible - did you look into Enabling write back cache?

Enabling or Disabling the Disk Write Caching

1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
2. Click the Hardware tab.
3. Click Device Manager.
4. Click the plus sign (+) next to the storage controllers branch to expand it.
5. Right-click the controler on which you want to enable or disable disk write caching, and then click Properties.
6. Click the policies tab.
7. Click to select the Write Cache Enabled check box.
8. Click OK.

NOTE: Enabling write caching generates the following warning. This is normal:
By enabling write caching, file system corruption and/or data loss could occur if the machine experiences a power, device or system failure and cannot be shutdown properly.

Still If you've got the onboard ports available then by all means use them.

pan07 · 18 Sep 2009 at 21:58

on the storage controllers there is no policies tab so no option to enable write cache.
if i go to disk drives and then adaptec raid 0 scsi device, on the policies tab i have optimize for performance enabled and greyed out.
so i guess all settings are correct, gonna put em back on board
when i got time.
will have to keep the greens on the rocket raid but they do seem to peform a bit better than the raptors on the raid card.
many thanks for the help anyway think i was expecting a bit to much from my raid arrays