raid card

vasqualo

vasqualo

vasqualo

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14 May 2008
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71
Hi, i have a striker 2 extreme with two hard disks utilising nvidia raid... I only managed 6800 in pc mark vantage and it lists my hard drive as the weak link.. Im looking at raid cards that can offer better performance than the on board controller but im confused with compatibility??? Does any one know what the best option out there would be for a pci x1 slot as the other two x16s are taken up with sli...
 
I have 4 velociraptors 300gb in a raid array.... when benchmarking, analysis reports that i am up to 70 percent slower than a scsi interface on the same board (striker 2 extreme)...
 
Can you post a HD tune benchmark of your current drives? What are you intending to do with your setup that your unable to do now?
 
There is not any PCI or PCIe x1 card that is going to provide you with a faster RAID array than the present on-board solution. All of the fast RAID cards are x4 or above, or PCI-X. Your best option, for speed, is to set up a RAID 0 array utilizing all four drives. However I really don't think that this is the cause of your speed problem in PCmark Vantage, this is all about processor and graphics performance, and everything else is an attempt at trying to sell you hardware products.

If you want to increase your score try overclocking the processor, and your graphics. what graphics cards are you using right now?
 
Yes ive seen that with vantage they are constantly providing links to new hardware...
I just wanted to get decent score in both 3d mark 06 and vantage (21000 and 6986) respectively... i will try out hd tune and post scores this evening although a raid stripe is probably going to be the best solution if theres no probs with the raid in the first place>
The comparison that they provided me with though online was embarrassing compared to the closest system match and for obvious reasons i dont want to miss out hence the question on sata controllers..

My cpu quad 9650 is ocd to 4.2ghz already and im happy there... i have quad sli also so is there anything else that can explain the low score in vantage??? Unless its just a marketing ploy?
 
yeah, I'd agree, no point at all. The scores that you have show that you system is more than capable of handling anything that you throw at it. Most of the really high scores on Vantage are teams that have built a rig to get a high score, not real world machines. If you score was much higher then they would be linking you to 'nitrogen cooling upgrades'. It is a nonsense really.

If you want a slightly more objective benchmark for your drives use one of the dedicated hd speed tests. You will see the popular ones on the review threads on here.
 
Thanks, i see what you are saying... I just felt like i was too far behind in those comparisons and to be honest my pc performs fine > Was just trying to make sure that im not losing out in performance after the time and effort put into other things... Here are my hd tune results... if these are all ok then ill stick with the raid stripe (2 disk) that i have
HD Tune Pro: NVIDIA STRIPE 279.47G Benchmark

Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 89.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 163.5 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 123.3 MB/sec
Access Time : 8.3 ms
Burst Rate : 101.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 5.7%
HD Tune Pro: NVIDIA STRIPE 279.47G File Benchmark

Drive C:

File Size: 64 MB

Block size Read speed
0.5 KB 6791 KB/s
1 KB 12086 KB/s
2 KB 20651 KB/s
4 KB 33235 KB/s
8 KB 43090 KB/s
16 KB 63421 KB/s
32 KB 72821 KB/s
64 KB 95322 KB/s
128 KB 119549 KB/s
256 KB 106238 KB/s
512 KB 107961 KB/s
1024 KB 109786 KB/s
2048 KB 122400 KB/s
4096 KB 111574 KB/s
8192 KB 112932 KB/s

Block size Write speed
0.5 KB 5567 KB/s
1 KB 7514 KB/s
2 KB 13117 KB/s
4 KB 25757 KB/s
8 KB 44431 KB/s
16 KB 64666 KB/s
32 KB 83754 KB/s
64 KB 114926 KB/s
128 KB 151070 KB/s
256 KB 150179 KB/s
512 KB 143285 KB/s
1024 KB 152849 KB/s
2048 KB 150959 KB/s
4096 KB 144661 KB/s
8192 KB 142583 KB/s..
 
I'm using an Adaptec RAID card and it's been much better than the RAID controller on my P35.
 
Your hd speeds seem a little low for velociraptors, not much above what you would expect for a single drive in fact. Check that you have cacheing turned on.
 
Hmm, the old NForce4 controllers gave better benchmarks with caching OFF for some strange reason. Might be worth a punt.
 
Do you know what stripe size you chose? I think the defaults are normally 128k for raid 0. Do you have two 150 GB drives in your array, or 4?
 
Funny enough i just thought about the stripe size option... i think its set at 128... Also i will try without caching and see if performance increases..
I have 2 300gb velociraptors in raid stripe... Just trying to get the max performance out of the array but benchmarking continues to single the hdds as the weakest link in the system...
 
You really should be getting over 200MB/sec transfer rates for two of these drives in Raid 0 (stripe). From the info you have given above, it does not look like you have 2 x 300 GB raptors in raid 0, the description says:

NVIDIA STRIPE 279.47G File Benchmark
Click to expand...

Which would indicate a single 300GB drive , which makes your transfer figures make more sense. Are you sure that you have two drives as part of your raid set in the bios?
 
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