RAID NOOB info/help needed

Massive Attack · 3 Jan 2007 at 20:19

hi all,

i currently have a 36gb WD 16mb cache raptor and i am thinking of buy an xfx revo64 3 port raid card and another raptor to go with, i was wondering is it worth me spending £125 for the performance boost and i have heard that windows can be installed straight onto the revo64 with no drivers is this correct?

rpstewart · 3 Jan 2007 at 21:22

There's no point in using an add in card for RAID0 unless you don't have motherboard RAID capabilities, there's no benefit to be gained from the card.

You'll need drivers for any form of SATA RAID solution, regardless of the controller type.

Phil99 · 3 Jan 2007 at 21:43

One of the main features listed for the Revo64 is the fact it doesn't need drivers for Windows setup

Unrivaled Ease of Use
Revolution is the world's first and only driverless storage adapter. NetCell has patented a technique for emulating a standard IDE device at the hardware level. As a result, the Revolution card does not require any vendor-specific drivers, but instead uses the standard IDE driver built into Windows.

Massive Attack · 3 Jan 2007 at 22:36

well the mobo i have does have 2 sata raid ports on it but with 2 raptors it maxes out at 100mb/s so with the revo it shouldnt be limited

rpstewart · 3 Jan 2007 at 22:56

Massive Attack said:
well the mobo i have does have 2 sata raid ports on it but with 2 raptors it maxes out at 100mb/s so with the revo it shouldnt be limited

Isn't that Revo card PCI? If it is then you'll be limited by the bandwidth available over the PCI bus - 133Mb/s shared between all the devices attached, which can include a number of the onboard devices (ethernet, sound etc).

33L · 4 Jan 2007 at 00:39

im using a generic raid card but with a jbod config (old socket a mobo with no sata) the two drives don't run very well over pci and i do have a lot going through the pci channels - nic, sound, usb hub etc

Massive Attack · 4 Jan 2007 at 13:08

rpstewart said:
Isn't that Revo card PCI? If it is then you'll be limited by the bandwidth available over the PCI bus - 133Mb/s shared between all the devices attached, which can include a number of the onboard devices (ethernet, sound etc).

uve got to be joking 133mb/s shared over pci, i will use on board raid then

rpstewart · 4 Jan 2007 at 13:25

Massive Attack said:
uve got to be joking 133mb/s shared over pci

'fraid so. The PCI standard is well over 10 years old, when it was introduced there was no need to shift that kind of amount of data about but times have changed. AGP, PCI-X and PCIe have all come along in an attempt to provide more bandwidth to add in cards, in time it's fair to suggest that each of these will fall by the wayside as bandwidth requirements continue to increase.

Massive Attack · 4 Jan 2007 at 15:40

rpstewart said:
'fraid so. The PCI standard is well over 10 years old, when it was introduced there was no need to shift that kind of amount of data about but times have changed. AGP, PCI-X and PCIe have all come along in an attempt to provide more bandwidth to add in cards, in time it's fair to suggest that each of these will fall by the wayside as bandwidth requirements continue to increase.

would you still recomend me getting another raptor and raiding them using the onvboard raid on my DQ6, is it worth the cost is what im asking?

rpstewart · 4 Jan 2007 at 15:59

Personally I wouldn't bother with 36Gb Raptors anymore, they're no longer any quicker than the current crop of 7200rpm drives. Sure they have low seek times but the sustained transfer rate isn't up to that supplied by the latest Seagates. For £60 odd you could add another Raptor or for the same money get a 320Gb Seagate that's near enough as quick but 9 times the size.

I'd have a think about a pair of Seagates in RAID0 if you want good speed at a decent price. There are a number of threads in the last month or so which compare HDTach graphs for the two types.

Massive Attack · 4 Jan 2007 at 16:02

rpstewart said:
Personally I wouldn't bother with 36Gb Raptors anymore, they're no longer any quicker than the current crop of 7200rpm drives. Sure they have low seek times but the sustained transfer rate isn't up to that supplied by the latest Seagates. For £60 odd you could add another Raptor or for the same money get a 320Gb Seagate that's near enough as quick but 9 times the size.

I'd have a think about a pair of Seagates in RAID0 if you want good speed at a decent price. There are a number of threads in the last month or so which compare HDTach graphs for the two types.

cheers m8 i will have a think about a seagate raid 0 setup but i will need to buy 2 drives as the ones i have are used for storaage

Massive Attack · 4 Jan 2007 at 19:30

just noticed that there is a pci-e x1 sata raid card available now, would this be faster than pci?

rpstewart · 4 Jan 2007 at 19:58

There's less chance of it being bandwidth limited if that's what you mean, PCIe provides 250Mb/s per lane (one lane for 1x) so there's over 50% more available bandwidth than with normal PCI.

Will it be faster though? That's going to be down to the drives you attach to the controller and the RAID config you choose. With a pair of fast disks (150Gb Raptors etc) then yes PCIe will be quicker and there will be less bus contention but with slower disks (36Gb Raptors, older 7200rpm drives) the difference may not be noticeable.

Massive Attack · 4 Jan 2007 at 20:00

whats the diff between the 16mb cache 150gb and 36gb raptors then for them to be slower?

rpstewart · 4 Jan 2007 at 21:02

Massive Attack said:
whats the diff between the 16mb cache 150gb and 36gb raptors then for them to be slower?

The data density on the 150Gb disks is higher than that of the 36Gb models so there's more data going under the head for each revolution of the platter. This means that data comes off the disk quicker on the 150s, hence a higher sustained transfer rate.

Massive Attack · 14 Jan 2007 at 18:22

ok soz for thread revival but i have a few more Qs, i am selling the raptor and getting another 80gb seagte 7200.9 and raiding them hpefully (cheaper),

i have a gigabyte DQ6 motherbpard and was hoping to use the onboard raid controler but i have seen limits to the performance it gives, would i be better off buying a pci-e x1 2 port sata card and using that?

is there a giude online on how to set up the raid as the bios options are confusing, i have never setup a raid array before so im not sure what to do?

thanks

rpstewart · 14 Jan 2007 at 19:30

The DQ6 uses the Intel IHC8R RAID implementation which should be fine, it's the DS3 with the GigaRAID controller which I've seen all the transfer rate problems with.

To set up RAID on the DQ6:

Make sure both disks are attached to the Intel controller ports
Backup everything on your existing disk as it will be wiped during the install
Create the RAID driver floppy or slipstream the drivers using nLite
Go into the main BIOS and in the Integrated Peripherals section set the SATA to RAID mode
Exit the BIOS and reboot, when prompted hit Ctrl+I to go into the Intel RAID BIOS
Pick "Create RAID Volume"
Give the array a name and make sure the RAID level is set to RAID0
Pick the two Seagates from the drive list
Set the stripe size, 32K or 64K are the usual choices
Pick the capacity of the array, it should default to the maximum, this is fine.
Hit Create Array to finish.
Exit the RAID BIOS, reboot and start installing XP

Massive Attack · 14 Jan 2007 at 20:12

thanks a lot rpstewart, just one question how do i make a floppy raid driver ive read than manual and its a bit cunfusuing it asks you to do it on bootup and boot from the A drive but that is not selectable in bootup options can it be done in windows?

rpstewart · 14 Jan 2007 at 20:19

According to the manual you just need to run menu.exe from the bootdrv folder of the mobo CD.

Massive Attack · 14 Jan 2007 at 20:31

ive done that but my system seems to have trouble writing the last file to the floppy disc, i get delayed write failed error everytime

edit: turned out to be a duff floppy disc fixxed now, thanks again for your help