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

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.

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

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

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

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