Did i get a good deal?

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just bought a pair of 1 year old WD Raptors, the 36GB ones, for £60 off one of my mate's. He just put in a pair of the 150GB ones.
I'm hoping it was a good deal!
I'm also hoping that I get a performance increase when i stick them in as a Raid 0 setup over my non raided WD 250GB SE16.
Now i'm going to have 4 western digital hard drives!! 2x36GB & 2x250GB. I know the raptors will run hotter and louder but my main rig ain't the quietest, and i'm not really bothered as it's not a 24/7 machine just a gamer.
Any tips on how to set the raid up on my DS3? i have the F7 bios i think, and have already made the raid boot disc thingy.
I've been doing a bit of reading up on raid, since i've never done it before, and am i right in saying that 64K is better than 128K for speed, when choosing.. err.. one of the options when configuring raid?
I know i know i'm a total raid noob, but i reckon it's worth a go, cos as fast as the WD SE16's are I reckon it's still the biggest bottleneck in my system.
I should have raided the two 250gb'ers in the first place, but they were bought at different times and i didn't have the storage space or time to backup the data from both drives to wipe them clean.
Any advice on raid, or a link for an easy how to, especially on a DS3, would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers.
 
realscot said:
Any advice on raid, or a link for an easy how to, especially on a DS3, would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers.
With a DS3 you can only run one RAID array using the JMicron controller (orange or purple ports, can't remember which) so the Raptors need to be connected there. You'll then need to create the array in the GigaRAID BIOS.
  • Shutdown the machine and remove the 250Gb disks and any USB drives or card readers, this ensures that you don't wipe anything you need to keep and that Windows will get the drive letters correct.
  • Ensure that on the Integrated Peripherals screen that the Onboard SATA/IDE device is enabled and in RAID/IDE mode
  • Save the changes and exit the main BIOS
  • Reboot and when prompted press Ctrl+G to enter the RAID BIOS
  • Select Create a RAID disk and hit enter
  • Go through the steps to create a RAID0 array, set the block size to 64K, the BIOS should automatically detect and assign the Raptors to the array
  • Reboot and go back to the main BIOS
  • On the Advanced BIOS features page check that the hard disk priority list has the array at the top and the main boot priority is CD forllowed by Fixed Disk
  • Save changes and exit, reboot the PC with the XP install CD
  • Press F6 when prompted to tell the installer you've got drivers to install
  • Press S when prompted to load the drivers, follow the on screen instructions
  • Complete the install as normal
  • Boot to Windows and load the drivers for the chipset, audio, network etc as normal
  • Once you're happy the install is OK, shutdown and reconnect the 250Gb drives. Windows should detect them automatically.
 
got the raptors in and working now. I'm only averaging 70mb/sec in HD tach with them though.. could use some help getting more out of them!!
I chose 64k as the size when setting up the raid.. other than that I ain't got a clue what to adjust or where!
 
All settings at stock.. using gigabytes raid drivers.
hdtach1nx4.jpg
 
Eeew that's a bit nasty. My first reaction was that there was something up with one of the drives but I've seen similar traces from Raptors on Intel controllers but with the oscillation about a much higher transfer rate. There's definitely something not right though, the average transfer rate should be around 100-110Mb/s for a pair of those drives.

The problem is that testing the disks would mean the breaking RAID stripe, setting them up as single drives, reinstalling Windows and then running some benchmarks and tests.

I'm grabbing the DS3 manual at the moment, if it turns up anything useful I'll post back.
 
As a novice I would say something is definately amiss there.

The burst speed isn't far off mine, the random access time is ok but the average read is way short.

Compared to most results I have seen it's very spikey. Have you tried the long test?

I'm a bit puzzled why your drive is labelled 'Raptors' when mine says 'Intel Raid 0 Volume 1'. According to the Gigabyte website you have an Intel Raid Chip on the DS3 so should be using the Intel Raid Drivers?
 
according to device manager i have ICH8?
Also downloaded the RAID tool from intels website, but when i tried to install it said my system didn't meet requirements. I did get the one for the P965 chipset.
I'm confused! I head about turning of a read cache option which can make it faster, but I don't know where to find that.
 
Yeah RPStewart is right the DS3's haven't support for Intel Raid, that's on the DS3P's. You are right it's ICH8 but the RAID is as RPStewart says on the JMicron controller.
 
Yeah it its the ICH8 on the DS3, I guessed and picked the wrong one earlier...

The read caching thing is for NVidia RAID controllers, the option is on the SATA controller properties page in Device Manager. I'm not sure if the JMicron controller drivers have the same option and if it would make any difference - I suppose having a look won't hurt.
 
Been having a read on the 'net about DS3's, very interesting.

Obviously your drivers and bios will be up to date?

What have you got plugged into the orange SATA ports? It may be worth disconnecting them and see what happens.

I was googling 'jmicron ds3 sata RAID'.
 
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