The effects of overclocking on RAID

[crsgardner]

I recently built an Athlon 64 system which, for all intents and purposes, has screamed. One of the reasons is that it uses a RAID 0 array with 2x 10,000 RPM Western Digital SATA drives. There's a Promise controller built-in to the motherboard that has performed stably (to the point that I've more or less "set it up and forget it").

I'd like to experiment with overclocking different components in the system, but I've heard some horror stories from those who've tried to up CPU voltages and frontside buses on other RAID systems (usually corruption of the RAID).

I'm assuming (and here's the real question) that I can get away with overclocking the video card's core and memory without having to worry about the RAID. Is this correct? Is the video card more or less self-contained, in that overclocks I perform on it won't affect the rest of the system? Or should I just forgo overclocking all-together? The small tests I've performed overclocking the video card have shown about a 20% gain, which is significant.

Thoughts?

 

[Matthias99]

OCing the video card *should* have no impact on any other devices (although, as always, this is hardware, and anything can happen if enough things go wrong). I don't think you'll have any problems, but back up first.

Raising your PCI bus speed is highly ill-advised with a RAID controller on there. This means that, unless you have a board with an AGP/PCI lock, you can't raise your FSB.

 

[oldman420]

quote
Raising your PCI bus speed is highly ill-advised with a RAID controller on there. This means that, unless you have a board with an AGP/PCI lock, you can't raise your FSB.[/quote]

yup with most board though this isnt a problem. i overcloced and underclocked my system when i had a raptor raid 0 setup and never had any probs and that was with the less stable siig chipset. with promise raid 0 you should be fine ocing.

 

[Haden]

Like Matthias99 said, just make sure bus is locked. I've seen silent RAID0 corruption because of high PCI clock.

 

[VideoQuasar]

Is my Asus A7N8X deluxe locked? I sure hope so because I've been messing around with this nifty CG-NVNF2 software that has my 3000+ barton 333 clocking at 2262.42 CPU and 174.03 FSB. It shows on sisSoftware SANDRA as being right there with a P4 3.2.

I have 2 250gb Hitachi IBM sata's running in RAID 0 with the on board controller.

 

[TerryMathews]

A7N8X is a bus-locked board. All A64 boards, AFAIK, are not PCI bus locked. Caveat overclocker, overclocking a bus that HDs sit on, directly or indirectly, can kill them. Dunno if that's still true with SATA HDs, but I wouldn't risk it with those drives being ~$200/pc.

 

[eno]

Running 36gb Raptors RAID 0 on my Abit IS7 800fsb board at 920fsb w/ locked AGP/PCI @ 66/33 and no problems for over 8months. I am getting a Athlon 64 3200+ soon and hope to find a good overclocking board to replace the one I am getting with it.

 

[Ages120]

Without a locked pci/agb bus and you can be sure to be enjoying reinstalling windows in no time.

 

[newParadigm]

I have a DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra B, which has a locked AGP/PCI bus, i breifly played around with the FSB, and now my RAID is corrupted.

I think that the SILicon Magic chip mite have gone bad not sure tho.

There's a more thuro description of my problem here

 

[daveshel]

If you start with a RAID 5 system that rins at 2GHz, and you overclock it to 2.4GHz, does that mean you will end up with RAID 5.1?

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: daveshel
If you start with a RAID 5 system that rins at 2GHz, and you overclock it to 2.4GHz, does that mean you will end up with RAID 5.1?

Absolutely...

On second thought, a 20% increase would yield raid-6

 

[newParadigm]

Originally Posted by: 3chordcharlie

Originally posted by: daveshel
If you start with a RAID 5 system that rins at 2GHz, and you overclock it to 2.4GHz, does that mean you will end up with RAID 5.1?

Absolutely...

On second thought, a 20% increase would yield raid-6

You're Kidding Right?

 

[oldman420]

yes they are. you have to stuff the drive bay with peanut butter first to get a true raid 5.1

 

[sao123]

All A64 boards, AFAIK, are not PCI bus locked

Doesnt the ASUS A8V Sckt 939 Mobo offer PCI Lock for use with the AMD FX series?
I had heard it is supposed to be one of the better overclocker boards...

 

[User1001]

Originally posted by: oldman420
yes they are. you have to stuff the drive bay with peanut butter first to get a true raid 5.1

And microsoft backs it with a guarantee...
I don't mean to be rude but is this really highly technical?

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Originally posted by: sao123

All A64 boards, AFAIK, are not PCI bus locked

Doesnt the ASUS A8V Sckt 939 Mobo offer PCI Lock for use with the AMD FX series?
I had heard it is supposed to be one of the better overclocker boards...

Via HAS NOT released a WORKING pci/agp locked chipset for the AMD64. They say the are working on it but yeah right. Supposedly a bios upgrade in the future will give us a working lock. You could raise the PCI frequency a little bit and still raid but anything over about 37 = trouble