Hd tach bench on raid0

snowdog · 9 Oct 2006 at 10:34

Hello,
Im using 2 7200.10's 250 gig in raid 0 and woudnered how fast they are so i did hd tach, however i dont know if its good or bad as most of the hdd to compare with in the program seem old ( no 7200.10 to compare with), *** raptors result also is odd, sata should be way faster.

So are these results ok?

snowdog · 9 Oct 2006 at 11:52

smids said:
For sustained read, you'll not beat that with anything but raptors. That is an excellent bench! What is the stripe size? If it is 64 or 32K, that is a very fast RAID0. The only time I came close to that sort of read was with a 16K stripe using 7200rpm drives (smaller stripes perform better in benches) which only hit 113Mb/s.

Obviously my raptor RAID0 hit 128Mb/s but these were raptors.

I dont know tbh, i used standard raid 0 options in raid bios( using ich7r controller or 82801GR/GH sata raid controller on a asus p5ld2) , i just pressed enter on everything in raid bios and this is how it turned out. Is tehre any way to know how large the stripe is?

EDIT: cpu is a p4 630 @ 4.1 ghz if it matters, 1090 mhz (quadp.) fsb, perhaps higher fsb helps??

snowdog · 9 Oct 2006 at 15:21

Minstadave said:
Another 2x250Gb 7200.10s in RAID0

Why is my burst so low

Nice even better as mine, have you removed the 2 ''limit to sata 150mb'' jumpers from your hdd's, if not thats why your burst is so low.

snowdog · 10 Oct 2006 at 22:25

if anyone's interested, i have a 128kb stripe, just checked in raid bios, worth changing to 64 or 32 ?? Its not my windows drive but it is my pagefile hdd and i have most of my games installed there too.

snowdog · 10 Oct 2006 at 23:06

smids said:
That was done with 128Kb stripe?!?!?!?!?!?!

Large stripes are good for larger files e.g games/photoshop/video editing but any file smaller than the stripe size is only placed on one disk, negating the RAID0 benefits. Most O/S files are much smaller i.e. 60KB etc, so 32KB stripe is a popular happy medium between the two. Windows runs very quickly on smaller stripes, whilst games are still fast all the same and considering windows is used more than a game, it makes sense to use smaller stripes. Your average read will shoot up with a stripe of 32KB - something like 135Mb/s I would think.

Renember tho, no windows on that drive, about all files are 200mb+ on that hdd, and pagefile is a 1.5 gig file, avarage file size is about 300 ish mb on my raid array i recon ( most modern games have data in them big .dat files of a few gigs )
Yet i have 3 spare 160 gig hdd's to backup my data from my raid array to delete the array and replace it by 32kb, would it be worth all the hassle?