100mbs from Raptor 74 + 7200.10?

[Jakalwarrior]

Does that seem about right? I raided my raptor with the first 74gigs of my new 7200.10, but I only get ~100mbs performance. The chart hdtach makes looks like a wave with squared tops. Avg seek 8.0. I was really hoping for something more like 130mbs :(
At only 100mbs wouldnt I be better off just slicing off the first 150gigs of the 500gig and getting the same performance with ever so slightly worse seek times?

[MartinuZ]

Im getting more than 100 MB/s with two really old 40GB hdds in a software raid set up with windows disk manager :>

Youre probably doing something wrong.

[Jakalwarrior]

Eh maybe ill try letting windows raid it, instead of letting my boards "raid chip" do it with a driver.
Dont think I would be able to use acronis to copy my OS over on to that though.

[One_Hertz]

ummmm yeah... You don't raid different drives together, ESPECIALLY drives that different. Get rid of the array asap. You are not getting any seek time benefits and you are hardly getting an str increase. Basically you get the worst of both worlds of both drives and you are getting two of that in raid 0.

This is very common sense and common knowledge, you really should have done a simple search before wasting so much of your time.

[Jakalwarrior]

Technically should be double the speed of the weaker drive, and whatever the seek is of the weakest drive. So twice as fast as the raptor with the seek time of the first part of the 7200.11. Seemed like a good idea to me if it was going to be 140ish MBS with 8 seek time, vs 100mbs with 8 seek time for just sectioning off the first part.
if its stuck at 100mbs though then I am going to kill the array. Didnt cost me any time, just mirrored my install onto my backup drive to run from. Then raided the two and put and mirrored it onto there too to see how it would perform.

[Serra]

I wouldn't be surprised if your 7200 rpm drive had a significantly higher sequential read speed at its outermost 74GB than the raptor does over its entire disk and the raptor was effectively bottlenecking the system. Kind of interesting really, you never get to see tests like this. Mind posting an HD Tach/Tune if you have one saved, just for future reference?

[Jakalwarrior]

I will as soon as I get home for work. I believe there is some sort of bottleneck or bug though. The graph was a perfect wave all the way across instead of diving like it should since the raptor is using the full disk area.

I forgot this board has done buggy things with hdtach before. Look at this bench it did right after I bought it. Fastest single raptor bench ever ;) if only it were true. Think ill try hdtune.
http://pictureposter.allbrand.nu/pictures/oic0/temp+pics/huh.JPG.html

I have done a lot of raiding of ol crappy disks or just random things together to see what it will do though. My normal result is twice the performance of the slowest disk, and since even ol crappy drives often got 50mbs you can usually make em somewhat fast. Though they end up with horrible seek times. I figured in this case I could get it to be about 40% faster than the 7200.10 alone and have the seek time still be decent since the raptor has a good seek and the seagate has good seek over that small little bit.

[Jakalwarrior]

http://pictureposter.allbrand.nu/pictures/oic0/Temp%20Pics/Raid.jpg

Looks like this. Just doesnt seem right to me. Perhaps M3A has crappy raid support?

The other 400+gbs of the 7200.10 gets 62mbs average speed.

[One_Hertz]

the 7200rpm drive is bottlenecking the access times and the raptor is bottlenecking the str, which is why its a terrible idea to raid those two together. Do you have a new raptor? I know the old 74gb raptors only had like 60mb/s on avg, which would make your results not far from the truth... THe new ones should indeed be getting more.

[Jakalwarrior]

Old old 8 meg raptor, which gets about 65mbs average.

Raptor ~65mbs avg, 8.0ms seek time
7200.10 ~75mbs avg, 8.5ms seek time
Combined ~100mbs avg, 8.5ms seek time

Soo trading my raptor and the first 74gigs of my seagate for pretty much a raptor X with 0.5ms more seek time. Seems

Unless the benchmark is wrong (incorrectly measures raptor seek?) it doesn't seem like that bad of a tradeoff to me. :shrug: I just figured I would be getting more like 120mbs with 8.5 seek time out of the combo (double the speed of the slowest in the pair, with some loss accounted for).

Lookin at this makes me feel a bit better though. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://fugger.netfirms.com/680i/hdtach.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php%3Ft%3D122354&h=582&w=975&sz=114&hl=en&start=8&sig2=aQCP27WLKomPc6j6j8ssMg&um=1&tbnid=zHDlk5tyh_k0aM:&tbnh=89&tbnw=149&ei=efwqSP31B4KWgALdotTuBQ&prev=/images%3Fq%3Draptor%2Bhdtach%26ndsp%3D20%26um%3D1% 26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

[Jakalwarrior]

Update, the raid controller on my board is now fubared? after about 2 days of use it started shutting down one of the drives and then being unable to detect it on boot most of the time. I thought the drive was dying but it appears to work fine out of raid.