Raptor 74gb Raid 0

littledave · 3 Feb 2007 at 13:57

Can you guys check this bench out, its the long bench with HD Tach, i cant remember what i set the stripe size to, bt i can remember i left it a default (Optimum), how can i find out?

WoZZeR · 3 Feb 2007 at 15:22

I notice you are using an NVidia chipset, have you got a utility on the driver disc to access your RAID details from within Windows (WinXP Raid Tool Application, I think it's called)? Failing that on Boot Up you should see a keyboard combination to press to access RAID Setup, on my Intel Chipset it's Ctrl I.

Your graph is not much different from mine, just I did mine on a short run:

littledave · 3 Feb 2007 at 18:07

Any ideas why my burst speed is so low

WoZZeR · 3 Feb 2007 at 18:53

I think it's the Stripe size, all the graphs I have seen with good burst speeds are using very small Stripes.

I am using a 128K Stripe size, in a month or so I am going to do a clean install and try 64K. Check out the tail end of this recent thread:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17684744&page=2

AndyOcUK · 3 Feb 2007 at 20:41

64 is the sweet spot with my 2 X 74Gb Raptors in RAID 0 (See Sig).

Some stuff here may be of interest to you.

Regards

AndyOcUK
OcUK Tech

rpstewart · 4 Feb 2007 at 11:03

littledave said:
Can you guys check this bench out, its the long bench with HD Tach, i cant remember what i set the stripe size to, bt i can remember i left it a default (Optimum), how can i find out?

Turn off the read caching on the RAID controllers in Device Manager, for some reason having it enabled messes up the transfer rates. You should get another 20Mb/s or so on the average transfer rate.

The burst speed is low because the 74Gb Raptors are SATA1 only. I wouldn't worry about it though, it makes no difference to real world performance.

AndyOcUK · 6 Feb 2007 at 22:37

Do u mean write caching?

rpstewart · 6 Feb 2007 at 22:55

No, read caching. I've no idea why but I think it could be down to how the Nvidia controller deals with the RAID array. It would appear that the windows driver is pretty much identical whether the SATA ports are in RAID mode or not. What's unclear though is how the two channels interact in RAID mode.

It's pretty clear from HDTach traces that turning off read caching (and NCQ if the drives support it) can give better performance across the array.

Leave write caching on, without it write performance is dire.

WoZZeR · 6 Feb 2007 at 23:55

The plot thickens, this is my original HDTach result:

This evening I downloaded the latest Intel RAID Drivers and upon reading this article immediately switched the Volume Write-Back Cache on. This is the new HDTach result:

I most definately am not complaining. Nice one!!

AndyOcUK · 7 Feb 2007 at 21:02

Running Vista 64.

Where are these mystery settings of which you speak wise one? lol

Looked in device mgr/ SCSI/ RAID controllers??!!??!!??

Best Regards

AndyOcUK
OcUK Tech :confused:

WoZZeR · 9 Feb 2007 at 18:09

Well, on my Intel RAID setup, I used the desktop utility, in advanced mode

(Intel Matrix Storage Console) which opens an information 'tree' and right clicked on my volume name. Talk about obscure to find....

So best of luck with your search but may be somewhere similar.

::: CooliceT :: · 10 Feb 2007 at 09:01

i downloaded that test program yestaday,

i put both of my raptors 74gig in a RAID 0.
they are fast, must faster then i had in sata on there own. but a lot more noisy. when there writing data, or searching.

but i ran the program. is this ok?

short test...

long test...

they seem alittle jumpy. or is that just normal...
never done this before. so im new to it.

but they seem to be ok. just sound like a a bag of nuts hitting each other when in use. i havnt tried a game yet. so thats my next step.

rpstewart · 10 Feb 2007 at 10:15

::: CooliceT :: said:
i downloaded that test program yestaday,

i put both of my raptors 74gig in a RAID 0.
they are fast, must faster then i had in sata on there own. but a lot more noisy. when there writing data, or searching.

but i ran the program. is this ok?

they seem alittle jumpy. or is that just normal...
never done this before. so im new to it.

RAID0 will be noisier than single drives because both disks will be reading and writing simultaneously.

The graphs are a wee bit jumpy, have you disabled the command queing and read caching in the RAID device driver properties?

::: CooliceT :: · 10 Feb 2007 at 12:24

i took of read caching like you posted in my old thread.
im now going to take of the command queing see if that helps.

i post here my results. here they are...
short again.

long version.

seems to be around the same.
im running just standard windows xp pro. 32bit

also. when i split the raptors in the RAID 0.

so instead of 138gig i just partition that to 70gig each
one has xp pro, other has vista

i also noticed when going into vista and checking my score. i only get 3.8

for some reason my memory is only a score of 3.8 it says it scores like a 512-1gig card :/

cant be right since i have 2GB OCZ Dual Channel PC4000 cost me a a lot last year. but not sure why thats doing that. everything else like graphics and harddrive is 5.9

anyway, thats for a different topic.
how can i speed up my harddrives, so they run more smooth.

i did both what you said.