raid question

[aethandor13]

when setting up raid what size is better for the cluster(?) size of the drive and why?

 

[CurtCold]

Depends on what you are doing. I would recommnd 64k

 

[aethandor13]

i have set up raid on my system and went with the 64 size, i mainly use it for games and some video editing and such. i was just wondering as to which size was better as i am going to reformat my system his weekend and when i recreate the raid i wanted to set it to what size would make it the fastest

 

[BatmanNate]

64k (the common default) sounds most advantageous for your setup. Basically you wouldn't want it lower unless you had a bunch of really small files.

 

[dullard]

It really varies with different uses and with different RAID solutions. Check out Anandtech's IDE raid comparison. It is getting a little dated, but the results are still good to see. The ideal stripe size varied drastically: 512kB (max allowed on that card), 64kB (max allowed on that card), 128k (max allowed on that card), and 256k were the ideal stipe sizes. Notice that many of the best results were found when using the maximum allowed.

If it is set too small, the drive must constantly start and stop writing - often hundreds or thousands of times per file. All that data dividing as well as all those drive accesses really slows the whole system down. Low sizes are only useful for many small files. But when working with small files, the I/O speed isn't really important so RAID cannot help in that case, thus it really is best to use a large size.