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Best stripe size for my Raid 0 setup?

mxnerd

mxnerd

Diamond Member
I just bough 2 2.5" Segate 500GB drive and I would like to use it as boot drive and also run VMware workstation on it, what would be the best stripe size?

Since Windows itself is a collection of small files, yet the VMware I'm going to run is composed VMs of big size file about 20GB, yet the VM will constantly update a small SQL database (10MB), what would be best choice?

Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H, O.S. Windows 7 Ultimate

Thanks.
 
Last edited:
64KB format for sql.

What i do is simple. i migrate the stripe size and do benchmarks in my environment. obviously sql likes 64K chunks but if you enable compression things start to change.

so build a raid, than migrate the stripe size - run benchmark, migrate, repeat.

Each controller/raid setup/app setup will be different so a generalization is going to be not optimal imo.
 
Thanks.

Last night I setup raid 0 on the disks. I updated the BIOS and then lost the config. That really scare the hell out of me. I decided not to boot from the raid 0 and did some test.

Surprise! Windows 7 software raid actually performed better than the AMD hardware raid!

I guess I'll use Win7 software raid for the setup. But no longer boot from it, just use it for virtual machines to improve VM disk performance.

I do have question regarding moving the software raid to another machine if the need ever rises. How can I do it?

Pictures:

Why the performance drops dramatically after 256K for hardware raid?

hardware raid 0 with 64k stripe
hardwareraid064kstripe.png


hardware raid 0 with 128k stripe
hardwareraid0128kstripe.png


raid controller enabled with Win7 raid 0
win7raid0withraidcontro.png


raid controller disabled with Win7 raid 0 (best performance)
win7raid0withraidcontro.png
 
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mxnerd said:
Surprise! Windows 7 software raid actually performed better than the AMD hardware raid!
Click to expand...

Not really surprising. Motherboard RAID is really just software RAID as well with the work being done in the driver, apparently the AMD driver isn't as high quality as the standard Windows software RAID drivers.

mxnerd said:
I do have question regarding moving the software raid to another machine if the need ever rises. How can I do it?
Click to expand...

You should be able to put both disks in the new machine and just import the array.
 
cheap raid (intel matrix) is software raid with a bios to setup a raid and the ability to boot from a degraded raid-set.
 
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