whats best for my raid setup

superfly · 31 Jan 2007 at 20:37

I had a raid0 setup about 5 years back on some maxtors, one died and obviously wiped all my data across the raid :-(

so im a little worried about loosing it again.

i currently now have a version1 raptor 36gig, 2x seagate 7200.10 320gig and a 400gig external disk.

I was wondering if it would be better for performance to have:-

Option1:
Raptor for OS progs(ms word, firefox, thats about it)
Seagate raid0 for games, dvd.isos, mp3s, hdtv rips, documents.
backup crucial data to external drive

Option2:
Get rid of raptor (it is a little too noisey for my liking) sell on aution site

Seagate raid0 for everything
backup crucial data to external drive

Option 3: dont know if poss??
As option2, but with 50gig partition on raid with OS, progs, games on. This would be nice if was poss as i dont want to be moving upto 600gig off disks when i need to ghost image my fresh OS back.

heres some specs of my disks at present:-

caching disabled

raptor
47.1 av read
access 8.8
burst 104

seagate - command queing off
66.0 av read
access 13.2
burst 262.7

caching enabled

raptor
48.0 av read
8.8 access time
burst 105

seagate - command queue off
66 av read
13.1 access
253.3 burst

seagate - command queue on
66 av read
13.1 access
243.3 burst

rpstewart · 31 Jan 2007 at 21:03

I'd go with option 3, it's what I use myself.

Don't bother with command queueing, it's designed for multiple simultaneous I/O requests in a server environment and doesn't really give you any benefit in a single user setup.

superfly · 1 Feb 2007 at 08:57

rpstewart said:
I'd go with option 3, it's what I use myself.

Don't bother with command queueing, it's designed for multiple simultaneous I/O requests in a server environment and doesn't really give you any benefit in a single user setup.

great thanks!! also another question, i currently have a ghost image to restore from, but this is just from the single raptor, could i create the raid and partition, and then ghost onto it, if so how could i modifty the boot.ini to recognize the boot part ? or will i have to do a fresh install and create the partition on XP setup?

thanks much appreciated, want to get these things ironed out before i start messing.

rpstewart · 1 Feb 2007 at 09:09

I've never been one for ghosting stuff but I don't think you'd have any issue with boot.ini, the partition numbers etc shouldn't change. The big problem will be making sure that the RAID drivers are there and working. Personally I'd re-install from scratch.

superfly · 2 Feb 2007 at 11:36

just about to create my raid here, but i was wondering what cluster size i should use.

I have done some reading and come to the conclusion that i should try 16k or 32k.

Im not bothered about wasting disk space atal, i will have 1 TB when i have all these disks up and running, so would there be an advantage using 32 over 16? or should i just stay at 16 like most people do?

my typical file usage is 4.5gig isos, game data 1-2gig + small little files i guess, 5mb mp3s, and 700mb videos, and also one or 2 4.5gig x264 movies.

basically as long as the disk is optimized for the game data and 4.5gig isos then ill be happy.

Thanks in advance

ill be posting some benchmarks before and after the raid which might be interesting.

rpstewart · 2 Feb 2007 at 11:55

The stripe size for the RAID is different to the cluster size used when formatting a partition, you don't waste space by using a larger stripe.

32K is the norm although 16K might give you better benchmarks. For big files like ISOs and game data you might get better real world performance from 64K but it's difficult to tell. I say go with 32K as a happy medium.

superfly · 7 Feb 2007 at 21:41

finally got it up and running, although im not sure if its working at peak performance?

RAID0 32K STRIPE - command queue off
106 av read
13.3 access
174.5 burst

The burst is a lot lower!!!! i thought it should be higher? could this be to do with the large 32k stripe size?

rpstewart · 7 Feb 2007 at 21:56

The burst rate makes no real world difference, it's just how quick the cache can be flushed, the average transfer rate is a bit low though. There seems to be a bit of a trend emerging that NVidia RAID controllers aren't turning in the sort of RAID speeds that are to be expected or can be obtained from the new Intel boards.

I'm getting about 115Mb/s out of my Seagates but the HDTach trace is flat from 0Gb out to about 500Gb before starting to tail off, it should start a lot higher and progressively tail off so something's limiting it somewhere and it sounds like you're in the same boat. Have you disabled the read caching as well as the NCQ in the RAID controller properties in Device Manager?

superfly · 8 Feb 2007 at 17:02

just disabled caching, and it seems to have improved things quite a lot!!!

RAID0 32K STRIPE - command queue off - Caching read+write off
117 av read
14.1 access
331 burst

will i notice ?? probably not, but hey

thanks for all your help! now back to overclocking the old 4600x2 :confused: