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RAID performance question

I

ianbergman

Senior member
Hey all, quick question--

does anyone have any hard numbers on how a 4-disk RAID array w/5400 RPM drives should compare in performance against a single 7200 RPM drive? Or at least a general idea of which would perform better for typical computing applications?

As you may have guessed, I have a 4-way 5400 RPM array that's not performing as well as I would have hoped (it benchmarks about halfway between a single 5400 and 7200 rpm drive). I've got the stripe size set at 128k, just FYI. I'd be sad if I have to spring for new drives (salvaged these out of some old machines i found in the basement 🙂)
 
A 4 way array is pretty much pointless unless you have 2 controllers, because if you put 2 of them on the same wire they fight over it because only 1 IDE device can talk at a time.

And for "typical computing applications" RAID is overkill and just asking for data loss.
 
If all the drives are in the same line you are probably over saturating it, ie, 4 drives with 30Mb transfer rate,(on a good day) will choke a card with say 80 Mb transfer rate.
 
it's on an ATA-100 RAID controller board with new cables, etc - according to the mfg (of course, when do we trust manufacturers), it should easily be able to hand the throughput... mebbe i'll try reducing to 2 and seeing if performance changes.
 
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