Crapy Raid Performance?

[MaxxxRacer]

I have a DFI nf4 Ultra-D with 2x 36gb 1st gen Raptors in a Raid 0. They are on the nf4 chipsets raid controller for clarification.

Recently I saw a thread on raid 0 performance and I was notcing that EVERYONE was getting better performance than me, and I was wondering why.. anyway here is a picture of the HD tach run I did.

If anyone has any ideas on how to improve performance id be glad to hear it.

[WeStSiDePLaYa]

what the strip size?

[MaxxxRacer]

I knew that question was coming. TBH im not sure. I just set it to the defualt in the raid bios setup. If you can tell me where I can find out I would gladly do so.

[Timmay]

When I was setting mine up, the default was around 2K or 4k - which is pathetic IMO, 32K minimum for me 64k is preferred.

[Reinvented]

Brian, the default stripe size for the nVRAID is 64k, which is too much. For you and performance, 16k is best, and the lowest.

[Ic3man]

Really? My DFI board defaulted to 16k but I found better loading times in BF2(which is what I wanted Raid for) with 64k. Not tried 32k or anything below 16. Dunno about all the tech stuff with HD's tbh...maybe I could improve my setup?



Thats with 2 Samsung SATA spinpoints in Raid 0. I would have thought something was wrong with your raid setup maxxracer coz your Raptors should stomp all over my Spinpoints, they already do with random access but not average read or burst speed which is odd.

[cupra]

MaxxxRacer do you use the nforce raid or the Silicon Image raid ?

[K404]

Raptors dont stamp all over SATA2 RAID, but slightly better.

Thinking has it that the best stripe size depends on the kind of files ya generally work with. Smaller stripe sizes can be useful with 3 or 4 drives?

@Ic3man, my RAID performance is very close to yours with the same 2 drives...reassuring, innit?

Do dual-cores help RAID performance?

[Praz]

My board also defaulted to 16K which is the setting I used.

[Zeus]

Honestly, i don't really know how to improve your HD performance other than defragging with Diskkeeper, changing stripe size or perhaps changing Sata ports.

After you ran HD tach you can click "compare another drive" .

Comparing my single 73Gb Raptor to 2x 36Gb Raptor in raid 0 shows that your performance is a lot less than the one in the graph.

[MaxxxRacer]

EDIT: I just checked it and sure enough its 64k stripes.. ohwell.

MaxxxRacer do you use the nforce raid or the Silicon Image raid ?

its the nforce raid.

Honestly, i don't really know how to improve your HD performance other than defragging with Diskkeeper, changing stripe size or perhaps changing Sata ports.

After you ran HD tach you can click "compare another drive" .

Comparing my single 73Gb Raptor to 2x 36Gb Raptor in raid 0 shows that your performance is a lot less than the one in the graph.

I used to use diskeeper but I found the service it used always crashed and never came back again. would have to reformat to fix it.. after i got tired of that I switched to O&O defrag which is WAY better.

Indeed your performance is WAY better than mine.

[Pandamonia]

i just benched mine with a half full stripe and no defrag at average of 128mbps....

which im very happy with

[Moonman]

Try changing it with this program:


16K is the fastest setting for me.

[Ic3man]

Cool, I have partition magic but I always thought that changing the blocksize would mean re-formatting, true? Don't want to thread jack but....which block size does everyone recommend for gaming?

[Pandamonia]

16k i think

[±Pink=FloYd±]

hmm was thinking of doing raid 0 with my next build. But would I be better off with a 74gb raptor?

[Pandamonia]

my 2 raptors rock in raid 0

[Moonman]

Cool, I have partition magic but I always thought that changing the blocksize would mean re-formatting, true? Don't want to thread jack but....which block size does everyone recommend for gaming?

No need for re-formatting.
But better be safe than sorry, so make a backup of your important data.

[LazyBum]

Silly question, but have you tried different cables? I have resolved RAID problems before simply by changing to better cables.

[krampak]

I'm using 16K stripe on my 2x36GB Raid 0 raptors (using Nforce controller on a DFI SLI DR Expert) on WinXP SP2:



So yours results seems a bit too low.


PD: I see some high access times out there... ! (your is good)

[Reinvented]

This sort of leads me to believe it's an onboard SATA RAID controller.

Everyone that posted in this thread with their awesome results (meaning where their results should be), mind telling me when you purchased your DFI board and what bios it came with when it shipped?

I'm starting to believe that the older boards such as Max's and mine are older. Hence, poor RAID performance due to age of chipset.

Last week, I had just RMA'ed my two Hitachi drives because they were having piss poor performance. And my board is pretty old as well. Purchased in April of 2005.

[Hassan]

Mine is an original revision board and my results are double Maxxx's but I have 4 Raptors, so its hard for me to say whether his is bad or not as I'm at the point where onboard is not showing anymore positive results, but my opinion is stripe size on Maxxx's setup. I personally use 16k and have for a while, regardless of benchs in real world situations it seems to be faster for me at the expense of cpu util%. Others will always argue that higher stripes are better. http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...7&postcount=31

Then again I learned alot from this thread http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=97422

[ugp]

I had poor RAID 0 performance as well. My single 74GB Raptor runs faster than my two 36GB in a RAID 0. I left the RAID settings to default.

[MaxxxRacer]

I just ran the latest version of partition magic (god forsaken symantec bought out the prog) and it says the block size is 4kb.. so thats wrong and I'm not about to bork the array by chaning the block size with a prog that cant even read the block size correctly.

EDIT: just thought about it. Its looking at the block size not the stripe size.. It cant change the stripe.. so this is useless.. I created an image with norton ghost (this is the greatest number of norton apps ive ever installed) and will fix the array with 16k stripes and then plop the image back in the raid.

[LexDiamonds]

If you do end up redoing things in the future, another performance booster is to set the HD cluster size in windows to the same size as your stripe. You do need antother temporary boot disk to accomplish this however.

Like UGP, I never got my 2x36 raptors to really perform like Id hoped so I switched to a single 74gb raptor. Same storage space, Less noise, less power, faster overall.