Raid Volume or Spinmaster F1 for OS drive. Results inside

Tom|Nbk · 19 Jan 2009 at 22:13

Ok so I got my new drive. Samsung Spinmaster F1 TB, this allowed me to pair up my two older drivers into a raid volume as spare discs which will hold MP3's and Videos and will be backed up onto the Samsung regularly. Now looking at the results I'm very very impressed with how much of a step up gave my two older 300GB drives with a 64kb stripe.

Which would you lot recommened to base my OS on?

Burst speed on the Samsung seems to blast away the Raid volume but the raid wins hands down on transfer and access time.

So what do you think?

Raid Volume results:

Samsung results :

Edward01 · 19 Jan 2009 at 23:00

Thought i'd do the same test for comparisions sake

F1 1tb samsung, (used for storage)

2 x 200gb Samsungs in raid 0 (2 - 3 years old), divided into 5 partitions and boot drive.

Actually quite depressed about my raid results, swear they used to be faster than that.

Tom|Nbk · 19 Jan 2009 at 23:06

So which one should I pick?

I'm leaning towards the Samsung purely because it's quieter, what do you lot think?

Edward01 · 19 Jan 2009 at 23:09

they aren't that differnce performance wise, go with the samsung as there is a lower failure rate when compared with raid 0

Cyber-Mav · 19 Jan 2009 at 23:10

operating system is all about loading up loads of small files. so access time is the winner in that department.

if u want to transfer large files from 1 drive to another then look at the sustained transfer rates from outer and inner edge of the disks.

remy87 · 19 Jan 2009 at 23:31

F1 320gb in raid 0
got a 2nd raid 0 my old 7200.10 320gb

if you have an UPS, turn both on "enable write caching on disk" and "enable advanced perfomance" under device manager.
just by enabling advanced perfomance I get from 130 to 194

and you can see the mad burst rate lol

Tom|Nbk · 19 Jan 2009 at 23:45

I'll have to try that, I am swaying to sticking with the samsung though for OS purely because it's quiet as hell compared to the other two older drivers and just using the raid volumes for storage of HD files. Did I pick the right stripe size? 64kb or should I try for a lower or higher stripe?

remy87 · 20 Jan 2009 at 00:01

I just took default 128 for both raid 0 OS and my raid 0 scratch disk since I move a lot of big files and frapsing it helps with bigger stripes.
Not enterily sure what stripe you would wanna use for OS drive though

MikeHunt79 · 20 Jan 2009 at 00:03

Go with the spinmaster/spinpoint/whatever-it's-called

Tom|Nbk · 20 Jan 2009 at 00:10

Is there a lot of difference between 64kb and 128kb, the raid storage will be used for mainly mp3 files accessed daily throughout the day and the occasional movie.

Cyber-Mav · 20 Jan 2009 at 02:27

Tom|Nbk said:
the raid storage will be used for mainly mp3 files accessed daily throughout the day and the occasional movie.

if thats all your using the setup for then a striped array seems like a daft idea to me since speed is not really needed with what your doing, and with a stripe setup if 1 drive dies then you loose data on the entire array if its running raid 0. your probably better off running the drives in a singularly config (unless you want to mirror for fault tolerance), and if the the system the drives are in is powered up all the time like my server is then you can set the un used drives to power down after a set time of inactivity.

if you want to do a striped array then going by the data your storing on your array use a 64k stripe size along with formatting the array using a 64k cluster size that way going by the average size of an mp3 you wont have much slack space being wasted.

if all you were storing was films then larger stripe size would be better.

Tom|Nbk · 20 Jan 2009 at 03:53

I think I've decided to use the RAID array for soley OS usage. Files stored within the OS are normally less than critical as they normally just house program installs all important documents will be stored elsewhere, I have two arrays of RAID0 which will house Windows XP and Windows 7. I will then use the Samsung as dedicated storage with mirrored partitions.

Mav any tips for cluster size/stripe size for an OS or will 64kb stripe be sufficient bearning in mind the swap files, downloads etc? Any tips appreciated. I'll crack on with the fresh OS installs later today.

Wiggins · 20 Jan 2009 at 09:51

If your only using the Raid0 for OS system files then 32k would be a better answer.

I did a lot of research into this when I went Raid and many people use 64k as an average for both the OS and gaming and 32k purely for OS usage. 128k was mainly used for dealing with large video/image files.

I still got a decent transfer rate of approx 60mb/s when moving large files on 64k.