Escalade RAID 10 + 4 75GXP HD - Need opinions on optimal stripe & cluster sizes

[jraneses]

I've posted a number of questions regarding a system I am building over the past week or so. Well I finally have all the components installed, and I've got a question regarding the RAID and file system setup.

I've decided upon an Escalade 6410 paired with 4 IBM 75GXP drives in RAID 10. I have not seen much comparison of different stripe sizes on this controller, but someone recommended I go with a 128k for maximum performance. This is for a system running Windows 2000 Professional, being used for programming, web development, graphics work, running a web server, sql server, and will also be used for some general file serving. I'd like to get some recommendations on this...in my mind 64k or 128k stripe sizes seem to be the best bets and the most popular, but I am not sure.

I am also going to run NTFS on this array. While I'd like the 10% performance increase of Fat32 (is that for real?), I'd prefer NTFS for it's robustness, security, and reliability. I may turn off indexing and a few things to speed it up however. What cluster size should I be using for NTFS? I think I read somewhere that it defaults to 4k. I know nothing of the internals of NTFS, besides knowing about the MFT a bit. I'm planning on starting with 3 partitions in the following sizes:

Operating System Partition - 5 gb
Applications Partition - 10 gb
Storage Partition - 50 gb

Can I stick with the same cluster size on each of these partitions or would different cluster sizes be appropriate for each partition depending on how large the partition is? Also, I consider the stripe size I used for the RAID array when I am choosing the cluster size? I'd like to know if they are mutually exclusive or do I need to consider them both together when deciding on each.

Thanks for any help...hopefully someone with some smarts in this area is home on a Friday night as I am. 🙂

Jason

 

[RedBeard0531]

Don't partition. If you want the reasons, read the AT FAQ on partitioning.

Also check out the AT article on IDE RAID if you haven't already.

you should post links to your other threads on this comp

btw how much did all this cost.

 

[jraneses]

The Escalade 6410 was $200, and each drive was give or take $225. Add the 1.4 AYHJA Athlon, 512 mb PC2100 DDR, Gigabyte GA-7VTX mobo, so on and so on...I honestly lost track of how much $ I spent. 🙂

I forgot to remove that first paragraph from my post...I cut and pasted from StorageReview.com where I asked the same things...I haven't posted regarding this system on Anandtech.com besides tonight. Any idea about changing the NTFS cluster size to something more optimal?

Thanks,

Jason

 

[RedBeard0531]

What will the comp be doing, and what do you think the average file size will be?

 

[jraneses]

It's a development box, I'll be doing C++ and VB work off of it. So figure a lot of compiling, web development, running a SQL server, IIS, and some file serving. A good portion of it will house files ranging in size obviously, but I'll also store some mp3 files, etc. I included most of this information in my original post. 😉

I'd say on average the files won't be getting too large.