Raid 0 Hardware :banana::banana::banana::banana: :)

**Speederlander** · 05-31-2008, 11:54 PM

Originally Posted by Buckeye

Nice find there !
Checking on that now to see if that would be a improvement.

Update:
The 1680 has been tested and it actually has same write speed but lower read speed. It is actually geared more for SAS.

How can the 1231 be OC'd as it is the current speed champ as far as I have been told.
<looks for a phase cooler setup for the 1231 and OC tools>

Have they tested with the newest firmware? 1.45 I believe. It made a BIG performance difference. It was only available as of 4/29/08 and likely wasn't considered in DVNation's original try with those, given your conversation with them on that controller took place on the 5th of May or before (implying their experiments happened in April or before).

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pci...erformance.htm
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache...lnk&cd=2&gl=us

Performance boost talked about in 2CPU as well.

**Buckeye** · 06-01-2008, 05:25 AM

hmm... good question Speeder. I will pass those links over to them and see what they say.

Thanks !

**Speederlander** · 06-01-2008, 08:59 AM

Originally Posted by Buckeye

hmm... good question Speeder. I will pass those links over to them and see what they say.

Thanks !

Post back any response because I am about to get one.

**Buckeye** · 06-01-2008, 05:26 PM

I saw you left me a PM Speeder but I have been unable to even see them because of an data base error.

But I think your question was if I had heard anything back, and saddly no I have not.

**Isaac MM** · 06-01-2008, 05:39 PM

Are you a millionaire or something? You gotta be to spend 10k on storage

**Speederlander** · 06-01-2008, 06:04 PM

Originally Posted by Buckeye

I saw you left me a PM Speeder but I have been unable to even see them because of an data base error.

But I think your question was if I had heard anything back, and saddly no I have not.

Actually I was going to ask you how the RAID 0 array "felt" in daily use. Is it a vast improvement or is the improvement limited to a few specific tasks?

I'm trying to decide on 2+ SSD drives in RAID 0 or one drive for OS + apps and leave it at that. The cost difference between the two is, obviously, very large. So is the improvement worth the extra $1600 it would cost for a controller plus the second drive? That $1600 can go to a lot of other hardware if it isn't going to this. Additionally, I could save even more and funnel that money if I went velociraptor for OS + apps. But I am willing to spend the money if the benefit is really that vast. I'm not yet convinced it is.

**BlazinTiger** · 06-01-2008, 06:21 PM

wait...so out of the 1231, 1280, and adaptec 5805, which one is best?

**Speederlander** · 06-01-2008, 06:22 PM

Originally Posted by BlazinTiger

wait...so out of the 1231, 1280, and adaptec 5805, which one is best?

adaptec is pretty universally not liked among the server people I have seen commenting on controllers in several forums.

**BlazinTiger** · 06-01-2008, 06:41 PM

so areca's are the "best" so to say

**Speederlander** · 06-01-2008, 06:43 PM

Originally Posted by BlazinTiger

so areca's are the "best" so to say

They come pretty universally recommended. Go to the 2CPU forums and ask around.

**BlazinTiger** · 06-01-2008, 06:45 PM

ok so then it comes down to 1280 vs. 1231 vs. 1681
im too lazy to read the 4 pages of this thread, but which ones "the best"

**Speederlander** · 06-01-2008, 06:48 PM

Alright, screw it. I'm not getting SSD for now.

Going:
Areca ARC-1680ix-16 16-Port w/2 gig of cache and 5x Velociraptors, 4 in an expandable RAID 5 and 1 for OS + apps + VMs (which will sit in a superspeed RAMdrive anyway).
If I go SSD then I can move the 5th raptor to the RAID 5 array and add the SSDs either singly or in RAID 0 format. This should make for a very snappy RAID 5 array and 16 ports on the areca can hold up to 128 drives with SAS expanders.

**Speederlander** · 06-01-2008, 06:57 PM

Originally Posted by BlazinTiger

ok so then it comes down to 1280 vs. 1231 vs. 1681
im too lazy to read the 4 pages of this thread, but which ones "the best"

1681 is unproven but the new firmware apparently offers a vast speed improvement. The 1200MHz clock speed in theory overcomes the approximately 800 MB/s ceiling on the RAID array throughput if you have enough drives. If you don't plan on going that many drives I say get whatever makes sense for you that's reasonably inexpensive (such as higher end controllers can be). Just make sure it makes sense for you.

**Buckeye** · 06-01-2008, 07:00 PM

Originally Posted by Speederlander

Actually I was going to ask you how the RAID 0 array "felt" in daily use. Is it a vast improvement or is the improvement limited to a few specific tasks?

I'm trying to decide on 2+ SSD drives in RAID 0 or one drive for OS + apps and leave it at that. The cost difference between the two is, obviously, very large. So is the improvement worth the extra $1600 it would cost for a controller plus the second drive? That $1600 can go to a lot of other hardware if it isn't going to this. Additionally, I could save even more and funnel that money if I went velociraptor for OS + apps. But I am willing to spend the money if the benefit is really that vast. I'm not yet convinced it is.

Well I can say this... it is freaking fast ! This is the one area that will take a machine that has a great OC on it, and make it like 100x's better. I notice it a great deal.

Mine is a rather large SSD Raid and I can fit a huge amount of stuff on it. But if you a large amount of Photoshop or video work it would rock your world. It is pretty unbelievable.

In gaming zones load extremely fast.

I believe that DVnation has a 20% discount on the MTRON PROs going on now. I like these because they are classed as server usage and have a 5 year warranty. That was very important to me as I was concerned about wear leveling, I am not now.

There are other brands coming out there that might be pretty good. Be sure to research them before buying.

The benefit is really that vast as the .1 access time is huge, that and the bandwidth you get from a Raid 0. I am very impressed with this Raid, but it came at a steep cost. Raptors are great and you can get some pretty good speeds out of them in a nice Raid and for the price of them you can’t go wrong either.

I am so lookig forward to getting a nice Phase Cooling setup for this rig to make this baby fly. That and a nice LN2 benching run would be great fun

**Buckeye** · 06-07-2008, 08:12 PM

Here is my PCMark05 screen of my setup. No OC yet, so everything is still stock.

I need to get PCMark05 Vantage, dang thought I had it.

I think my HDD stats can be improved also. With XP they seem to get much higher results, stupid Vista

**m^2** · 06-08-2008, 08:06 AM

Vista should score better as it was supposed to be SSD aware.
I guess it does nothing with this awareness. :P

**Buckeye** · 06-09-2008, 08:45 AM

Originally Posted by m^2

Vista should score better as it was supposed to be SSD aware.
I guess it does nothing with this awareness. :P

I think you might be right, but also it's the benching program. I have not found 1 program that will match up to any other's stats wise when using this Raid for testing.

**Anemic** · 06-10-2008, 05:12 AM

Originally Posted by Talonman

I love the rig Buckeye...

It's just so Xtreme...

+1 !

Its so very...XS

**Omarko** · 06-16-2008, 10:32 PM

Hi

I have seriously considering getting 2 x 32GB Mitron Mobi's which have 100mb/s read rate and raid-0 them to get a 64GB OS drive which is fast and dead silent for my quiet PC.

Can those that have these drives tell me ... how much different does it feel compared to a standard desktop drive ? How quickly does Windows load ? How responsive is the system ? When you launch apps, is it faster than when launching from HDD ?

is there a comparison of SSD vs 7200rpm drive vs 10.000 rpm drive in terms of seconds etc ...?

I just dont want to wasted $900 if I can get away with getting maybe 2 x WD6400AAKS for fraction of that cost ...

cheers!!!!

**Buckeye** · 06-17-2008, 04:16 AM

Here is 32GB MTRON MOBI vs Raptor.

That said if you are talking about getting 3 and using Raid 0 your bandwidth should be around ~280-300mb/s.

http://www.dvnation.com/benchmark-6.html

What really does it with SSD's imo is the access times, at 0.1 things really spring into action fast. Writes could be faster but again imo the access times more than make up for it.

Your Motherboard Raid setup should be fine with using 3.

**Omarko** · 06-17-2008, 12:21 PM

Originally Posted by Buckeye

Here is 32GB MTRON MOBI vs Raptor.

thats a veeeeeery old raptor ... it should be compared to the 300GB Vraptor which is on par with SSDs with STR....

of course, access time is the secret ... I still would like to get answers to my questions though before I fork out all this cash ....

**Sandon** · 06-29-2008, 03:48 AM

Yeah, I don't know whats up with hdtune; it gives me crappier results as well. For example, on my 12x1TB in raid5 ARC-1231ML on hdtach I get:

Hd tune only supports 2 GB and always gave me spikes somewhere:

My actual file-system tests give me similar results to hdtune (without the spikes) but since I am reading/writting from a file-system it does add some overhead:

Write speeds:

sabayonx86-64 data # dd bs=2M count=10000 if=/dev/zero of=./20gb.bin
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
20971520000 bytes (21 GB) copied, 31.7737 s, 660 MB/s

Read speed:

sabayonx86-64 data # dd bs=2M count=10000 if=./20gb.bin of=/dev/null
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
20971520000 bytes (21 GB) copied, 26.809 s, 782 MB/s