Post your hard drive benchmarks!

Will be having a pair of 150GB Raptors in Raid 0 very soon. Will be posting results tomorrow hopefully using the onboard raid function (ICH9R)

Is there anything I should know about setting up Raid 0, as I have never tried raid before. I know people keep going on about stripe size, is this something that you set up when you load the drivers, then format the drive (using a stripe size im guessing). I will be using Vista64 Ult.

:)
 
easyrider said:
Sometimes the smaller stripe size can have a negative effect.

It all depends on what file sizes will be written to disk.

For editing video a larger stripe is beneficial.
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Well im just going to be using it for loading games, running the os/apps things like that. Wont be doing much video work or stuff like that.

So you reckon 128k?
 
smids said:
Any file smaller than the stripe is NOT RAID0'ed so to speak. i.e. it will be placed on one or the other disks.

I would highly recommend smaller stripes unless you are doing video editing. The O/S is the main stay, and for this I would recommend 32KB. 16KB requires too much defragging all the time. 32KB is a happy medium between a good OS speed increase and good gaming performance. I would not suggest running 128KB as the OS just wouldn't benefit. Most files for an OS are tiny - .dll's etc and would highly likely be below 128KB. Most are around 20KB or so. This is why I suggest 32KB. Games will still load quicker, but the large cache files may not benefit as much as if it was a large stripe. The question is, how much of playing a game is actually the map loading, and how much is the reading of DirectX files etc and other files to bring everything into motion?

Just my 2p anyway.
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Perhaps 64KB would be a nice happy medium then?
 
rpstewart said:
<Fluff> Not arrf! </Fluff>
I've seen that drive produce slightly quicker benchmarks for other folk (maybe 5% only) but that's still comfortably quicker than any other single drive in this thread I think. I can't justify replacing my current stack of 250s with these but I can definitely see some 7200.11s coming my way.
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Quite impressed with the latest 250GB HD's

When are the 7200.11 coming out?

I dont think there will be anything smaller than 500GB coming out for the 7200.11 series.
 
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HHM said:
Like rpstewart, I had a good eye for these babyes, but the performance under
150 mb/s in raid0 is disapointing I think, I think I will just use single disks for my
new video-pc, then I will spare my self for the troubles configuring Intels Matrix
Raid as well. Also the amount that raid is contributing to faster render-time and
general work-flow seems hard to figure out, might as well stick with just a pair
of these ST3250410AS and then just be happy about the 110 MB/S as is, well
maybe wait for the .11 series and enjoy the bigger cashe, on 32 MB versus 16,
in case that it REALLY matters in the real-world use ? (video edit / audio DAW)
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2x Seagate 250GB Barracuda's (ST3250410AS)

Raid0 32k Stripe

Seagate-Raid0.jpg


Better?
 
HHM said:
Still the same I guess, and access time is not "good" like easyrider points out
I am sad it is not better, but at least I can avoid going the same route now
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I dont think access time means jack **** tbh.

I have used single a single raptor with quick access time and my Seagates in raid0 blows it away. Apps load much quicker, OS is more snappy, BF2 maps load really quick, infact anything loads quicker! Overall I see no disadvantage, only advantage with raid0 so far. Im loving my Seagates raid setup atm. :D
 
HHM said:
Thats cool :) I didn´t come here to spread bad wibez :D just for me personaly
I would say with a 110 MB/S drive then ending up with 140-150 is not enough
bennefit being woth it,.. it was not only the seek-time I was after,... but the
hole picture, to pay for two, (in my case 4), to use time getting familiar with
the unboard controller and raid-options, possible problems with this, all the
time considered that people who actually need performance, (vegas users),
in many cases seem to end up with the simple uncluttered setup, anyway I
will not high jack this topic, just try to understand the diffrent factors
involved in noticeable performance increase when editing and rendering

I am fully aware that raid-increase is not fully scaleable, but with these 2
hard-discs I would have expected 160-170 and not below 150
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The Seagates from what I know dont get as high as 110mb/s, so I dont know where your getting your info from m8.

More like 85-90mb/s tops. ;)
 
HHM said:
Hi again :) I gave links to the documentation already some days ago i another
thread, and rpstewart has touched the subject also several time, 110 mb/s is
true if you read down the pdf carefully in the right colonne, the reason for this
great figures in the smallest .10 disk is that it is in fact a .11 platter used

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=10107394#post10107394

but then again, maybe your measurings shows that series .11 is not what
seagate whant us to believe they are, so lowering the expectations maybe
is a good idea, the bleeding edge consensus seem to be that seagate did
beat hitachi and samsung with this one, (as far as I can tell),....
Click to expand...

I very much doubt you will get that speed in reality. Check out Yeggstry's post on page 12 of the forum. I think thats more realistic.

Personally I would not believe everything you read on paper . . .
 
Been a bit of a learning curve setting up raid, but its getting there nicely.

It seems making sure 'write back caching - ON' makes a difference.

Also disabling my usb flash drive using readyboost helped get a better curve and slightly more speed.

hdtach3.jpg


162MB/s average :cool:
 
Can someone just explain this for me, as im trying to get my head around strip size. For example for my array which is based on 3 disks, if I was to select a 32k strip does that mean it would divide a 32k file by 3 (as there is 3 HD's)? So basically more of less 11k of data on each hard drive?

Or does it work different to that?
 
On average how big are games/applications/windows vista64 OS files? Only reason I ask is because im trying different strip sizes and im trying to find out which one is the quickest and best suited for my needs. . .

Im currenly experimenting with a 16k strip.
 
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