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?

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

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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?

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

Massive Attack · 16 Jan 2007 at 11:46

also just remeberd whats the best stripe size to use, 4-128kb, im not sure.

thanks

Massive Attack · 16 Jan 2007 at 11:51

thanks for the super fast reply, think i will use 64 then as it will give the best performance between bemchmark and transfering data

edit, do games use lots of small files for level loading etc? also will windows bootup be faster on 32kb stripe

Massive Attack · 2 Feb 2007 at 15:23

ok so ive fianlly got it running on the intel controler with my 2 80gb seagate drives connected to 2 of the yellow sata ports top right 2, now how do i connect my 3 storage drives up as everytime i connect one i get error loading OS.

Massive Attack · 2 Feb 2007 at 15:51

really need help asap