Raid 0 Question

Soldato
Joined
20 Aug 2004
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3,115
Location
Bournemouth
I was thinking the other day about my RAID, mainly as to why it gives such bad performance.
Then I remembered that when people on other threads ask about setting up a RAID theres such things to think about like the mode the drives are in, and the size of data blocks saved to each drive in turn, and I'm curious if I have missed out something vital which is bogging it down!
Basically I have RAID0 of 2x500gb SataII drives and it takes 3x longer to load games the a friend of mine running on a solo sataII with identical hardware. So basically is there any way to check the RAID settings, as the RAID controller options seam very limited when I went in to them earlier, just options to make a new RAID or break one!

Bios settings:
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HD tune tests - Random Access:
RAID
hdtunerandomaccessraid.png

1TB nearly full drive
hdtunerandomaccess1tb.png

HD tune tests - Read Speed:
RAID
readspeedraid.png

1TB
readspeed1tb.png
 
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I dont have the info you want. But if it comes to rebuilding your raid you should go for a 64k block size. Its the best all rounder. These readings seem strange as i get noticeably better performance from my raid when it comes to game loads etc.
 
Thats the random access one done. I added an identical test running on my almost full 1tb drive as a comparison.
 
Been having another google around at pictures of other peoples HD tune setups, specifically RAID0 2x500gb setups like mine, and I should definately be getting more throughput lol. I'm doing a thorough error check on hdtune now just in case, but I'm sure if there was a disk error I would have had some crashes by now, but performance has been stable. Albeit very slow.
 
I wouldn't expect any RAID-0 setup to be slower than a JBOD disk setup and 64k block size as more than ample for your needs. Have you checked the drivers are up to date?

I notice too you have other JBOD disks. Unattach them for the time being and retest to see if they're not slowing the RAID setup.

Lastly, have you run a disk check utility on each of the individual disks that are in the array. If one of the disks is degraded, then one will slow the other down. You won't necessarily get a raid error, until it's had enough or failed completely.
 
I wouldn't expect any RAID-0 setup to be slower than a JBOD disk setup and 64k block size as more than ample for your needs. Have you checked the drivers are up to date?

I notice too you have other JBOD disks. Unattach them for the time being and retest to see if they're not slowing the RAID setup.

Lastly, have you run a disk check utility on each of the individual disks that are in the array. If one of the disks is degraded, then one will slow the other down. You won't necessarily get a raid error, until it's had enough or failed completely.

Ah didnt know they could slow each other up! I'll give that a whirl. As for error testing, I did them last night after the other checks and came up fine so thats good.
As for block size... I cant remember what I set up when doing this, and the bios doesnt let me see. Is there any way to check?
 
Hmm Thought we had something there lol, the random access improved noticeably but the read speeds are still painful.
randomaccessdriverupdate.png

readspeeddriverupdate.png
 
Just did a few tests with just the RAID, just as bad as before. Hmmm. I would be better off having no RAID lol and just 2 individual disks. But I'm determined to sort this problem out!
 
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