WD Caviar Blacks in RAID 0

Jonnygrunge · 11 Feb 2011 at 11:08

Guys,

We have put together a Audio Visual PC at work, mainly for video editing. We bought the Foxconn P45AL to work in conjunction with some existing hardware. To our horror we discovered that this board has no RAID support. We have now bought an SIS Sil3132 PCIe to SATA II RAID card.
The drives are configured in RAID 0 (128K Stripe) The problem we seem to have is the drive performance! Readings taken from HD Tach,
Average read 112MB/s, Burst speed 144MB/s!
I have the same drives on my own PC, on a X58 Extreme and they are about running twice as fast, it's as if striping is having no effect! Any ideas?
Regards,
Jonnygrunge.

matthab · 11 Feb 2011 at 14:19

Intel controller is a better controller than the SiS controller.

Jonnygrunge · 14 Feb 2011 at 10:12

I can get hold of a JMicron JMB363, would this be a better option than the Sil3132 card? It's just the Blacks seem to be bottle necked atm!

matthab · 14 Feb 2011 at 10:25

My single black does over 100mb/s on the Marvell controller so it does appear to be bottle necked. Try sourcing an adaptec or LSI card. These cards are proper hardware raid and will be a lot faster. Probably faster than you x58 RAID.

CaptainCrash · 14 Feb 2011 at 10:52

If the primary use is video editing, have you considered using one drive as source (preprocessed) and one as destination (postprocessed), rather than combining them in a striped array? That way, both drives can be reading and writing concurrently - a single RAID0 array can only perform consecutive reads and writes, so even after allowing for its theoretically doubled STR, you're no better off in terms of overall throughput, and you have extra seeking added into the mix.

If you really do feel only a striped array will do, then you'd be much better off with a true hardware solution as mentioned above, rather than cheap and nasty fakeraid such as the Sil3132 or JMB363.

Jonnygrunge · 14 Feb 2011 at 11:08

CaptainCrash said:
If the primary use is video editing, have you considered using one drive as source (preprocessed) and one as destination (postprocessed), rather than combining them in a striped array? That way, both drives can be reading and writing concurrently - a single RAID0 array can only perform consecutive reads and writes, so even after allowing for its theoretically doubled STR, you're no better off in terms of overall throughput, and you have extra seeking added into the mix.

If you really do feel only a striped array will do, then you'd be much better off with a true hardware solution as mentioned above, rather than cheap and nasty fakeraid such as the Sil3132 or JMB363.

Sounds like a plan! Think we will ditch the fake RAID card! So what are you saying? Have one drive with the OS, etc.

Would we better to import the source video to the OS drive then edit and transcode the data onto the second drive?, or import to the second drive and do all manipulation on it?

CaptainCrash · 14 Feb 2011 at 11:42

I don't suppose it matters which drive is source and which is target - however, if I were doing it, I'd create a small partition for the OS on one drive (how small you can get away with depends on what apps you're installing, but as a reference many people are using 60-80GB SSDs successfully), then use the rest purely as a data partition. If you'll be dealing mostly with very large files, you could format this partition using a 64KB cluster size, which should minimize the NTFS bookkeeping overhead and perhaps speed things up a little more.

The second drive (whether source or target) would presumably be just one partition, again using a 64KB cluster size.