Drive layout

Mercutio · 30 Jan 2008 at 12:42

I currently have a fair sized collection of disks and looking to slim it down slightly. To this end im going to shuffle things around a little to ensure I get the best from the drives available.

Plan was:

2x 74GB raptors as boot/system/games
1x 36GB raptor as pagefile (with pagefile on seperate partition on start of drive) a backup windows install to rescue any raid issues with the boot drives (painful personal experience of trying to resurrect a raid from command line) and any serious disk grunt work (unpacking zips etc)
several (currently 4x 320GB - likely to condense down to a pair of 500GB drives as im only using around 800GB and being lazy with burning stuff to DVD etc) as media storage.

Anyone care to refine it?

rpstewart · 30 Jan 2008 at 13:18

Sounds reasonable. Not 100% sure about the 36Gb Raptor, you could use one of the media drives for the same purpose but I suppose if you've got a spare Raptor then why not....

marscay · 30 Jan 2008 at 13:27

that was my thinking too - not needed at all really but if it's just going to sit there ......

you could think about raid 5 for those 320gb drives though, would add some reduncancy to your storage at least.

poor write speeds unless you get a processor based card but if it's for media storage it shouldn't matter but it totally depends on what you want ...better speed or better safety (not safe

just safer).

Mercutio · 30 Jan 2008 at 16:46

As far as the raid 5 goes, have been there before, only software (which should in theory be nearly as fast as dedicated hardware) and got a fairly mixed bag from it. I am looking at the highpoint 2310 however and keep the collection of drives for raid 5 though. Anyone know anywhere showing the raid 5 performance? All the reviews I can find use raid 0 and 1 which seems a little pointless test wise.

rpstewart · 30 Jan 2008 at 19:06

I use a RocketRaid 2320 which is the 8 port version of the 2310. With 8 Hitachi T7K250s (which ain't the quickest) I can get reads averaging about 200MB/s - check the first page of the benchmark thread. Writes are reasonable, 60 - 80MB/s, in theory this could be faster with fewer disks since fewer XOR calculations are required.

marscay · 31 Jan 2008 at 09:21

Mercutio said:
As far as the raid 5 goes, have been there before, only software (which should in theory be nearly as fast as dedicated hardware) and got a fairly mixed bag from it. I am looking at the highpoint 2310 however and keep the collection of drives for raid 5 though. Anyone know anywhere showing the raid 5 performance? All the reviews I can find use raid 0 and 1 which seems a little pointless test wise.

unless you go for a card with a dedicated IO processor you won't see writes above 50-80MB/s & you could be lucky to get that, read speeds are generally pretty good in software as there's no processing to be done.

i doubt performance with the highpoint 2310 will be any better than a recent intel controller such as the latest ICH9R seeing as the highpoint is all done in software ...just like the intel.

the new highpoint 3520 looks a nice 8 port card with the IOP341 processor but it also costs 300quid or you could look at the Areca range with varying prices but high quality.

Mercutio · 31 Jan 2008 at 22:55

Ahhh i wasn't sure where the hardware processors started. I know the 2320 is hardware, the 2310 looked like the 4 port version of that card. Shame

marscay · 1 Feb 2008 at 05:10

no afaik the 2320 isn't hardware either, just an 8 port version of the 2310.

for what it is it's pretty pricey imo, only another 100 pounds for the newly relsd 3520 with latest Intel XOR processor.

looking on the highpoint website the 3320 looks a nice card too, uses the 1st gen intel chip instead of the latest 341 so should be cheaper and it's still a 8-port 256mb pci-e card also. but i can't see it available anywhere so no idea on the actual price but it should be in between the 2320/3520 price wise i'd expect.

rpstewart · 1 Feb 2008 at 07:11

The 2320 isn't a true hardware solution in the way that the big Areca and 3Ware cards are but it does have a degree of hardware acceleration for the XORs - hence the chunky heatsink on the card.

marscay · 1 Feb 2008 at 09:06

ahhh ic that would explain the heatsink and the price, i was kinda wondering about that myself but their product info doesn't really give a lot away.

it looks like highpoint are making a concerted effort to enter the higher end of the home user/consumer raid market with the 3xxx series.....can't be anything but good news with more competition.