Just got meself a bargin

davetherave2

davetherave2

davetherave2

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Joined
27 Mar 2003
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Well I have just got a fantastic bargin on a couple of 74GB WD Raptors.

A mate of mine was getting rid of them as he is downgrading his system so I know they are from agood home. I was expecting to pay around the £150 mark for the set but when he said £100 for them both I snapped them up straight away.

Now I can finially get round to setting up that raid 5 array with 3 raptors given that I already have one. Hope to do a couple of benchmarks to see what sort of performance I get out of these bad boys.

Just wondering if anyone else has setup a raid array with 3 of these and what sort of performance you have got. This will be setup as my os and main apps drive and hopefully will last me a good while before I need to start adding any more drives.
 
Not sure exactly about figures but read speeds should probably be about the 150MB/sec mark (if they are on a PCI-E bus, otherwise it will be about ~115 MB/Sec as restricted by the PCI bus). The only thing with using RAID 5 for an OS drive is that in RAID 5, write speeds drop because the CPU (software RAID) or the RAID controller (hardware) has to calculate the parity for the data and write that which can add some overhead. Read speeds should fly however so enjoy!

Just make sure you show us some HDTach benchies. Nice bargain aswell!
 
well I have just setup my new raid 5 array with the 3 WD Raptors that I have and after a few headaches and ripping two machine to pieces to reinstall the system I have my first results. I am using the Silicon Images raid 5 controller on my Asus A8N-SLI Diluxe mobo so not really to sure how this compares to other onboard raid controllers but hopefully it does me well.

hdtest.JPG


edit: this is with a stripe of 64kb the default it recommended.
 
Last edited:
No he hasn't. I think the reason for the less than good performance is a mixture of the stripe size, the controller and the mode it has set the array in. Because I am using it in a legacy mode this seems to have an impact on performance. So I am going to change the boot drive to one of my spare 120 GB drives and then have this for an apps drive.
 
Well scrap the above post. I have just installed the latest drivers and raid config program and it seems as though it has improve performance a lot. here is the latest test I did.

hdtest2.JPG


Now hopefully this is a bit more like it
 
why did you use the Silicon onboard thats going thru pci bus
i dont understand why manufactures put those cheap solutions onto their motherboards and then charge £40 more for a board.

 
well the nvidia controller doesn't allow you to use raid 5 which was what I was hoping to use. I might just look at getting another raptor and then do something like raid 1 + 0 or have a 4 disk raid 0 array.
 
Yep, nF4 would be the best option since it's on the PCI-E bus. It does look like your second results are PCI restricted. It's a shame that AMD nF4 doesn't do RAID 5 as the Intel nF4 chipset allows for RAID 5 so it can be done. You can get PCI-E SATA RAID cards but these can be quite expensive (although they tend to be hardware RAID so it takes the pressure of the CPU and you pay a premium for that).
 
my bios shows raid 5 for nvida controller weird
never tried it though
better option yes would be an addon card pci e controller, can be pricey
but performance would really good as it will be getting done @ the hardware level.
 
Actually you can pick up a 4 port controller from Highpoint for about £125 PCI-E.

Cheaper is the SiI3132 controller 2 port pci-e ~£18 then source (very hard) a port multiplier SiI3726 chipset board (only place I've seen that sells these is in America and it costs about £55.
 
well as I said I will give the raid 5 a go and if i don't see any noticable improvements then I will go for either a raid 0 with 4 drives or go for a raid 1 + 0 and see what sort of performance I get out of that.
 
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