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Thoughts on my drive setup?

R

Ramses

Platinum Member
I posted the other week amidst lots of pondering about if to use my on-board raid from the 990FX board I have and got the usual resounding NO, and took the advice for a change.

So I got a 9650SE-2LP 3ware card for $50 with cables on eBay that seems like a decent deal for a hardware card, even if it is older since speed isn't really important for my application.

Baring in mind that I made the decision not to go SSD for now, my planned setup is a 1TB 6th gen WD Raptor split between Windows 7 and Linux Mint, a 3tb Seagate 7200.14 that I will partition and split between Win7 and Mint for programs/User and games, and on the 3ware card run RAID 1 with two WD 2TB black drives for backup of movies and music and documents I'd rather not loose. Seems like a sensible setup and fast enough to me, and I already have the drives.

Anything glaringly bad stand out that I'm missing?
 
Are you using the RAID 1 solely as a backup or are you also storing the movies and music there? While RAID 1 will protect against a drive failure, it does not protect against data corruption and hence it doesn't replace a proper backup.
 
I have a spare 1TB drive that will either live in this box or an external enclosure as a backup to my "backup" raid set for really-really important stuff. I'd rather not loose the music and movies but realistically they are replaceable, the documents and photos aren't so they will be duplicated elsewhere. I know RAID 1 isn't a substitute for a backup, but as low as the buy-in cost is I think it helps matters. I had a bad experience with a drive dieing once that was set to be backed up a few hours before it died.
 
Then it sounds good. Just thought I would check since unfortunately there is still people who think a RAID setup can replace a backup.
 
Hellhammer said:
Then it sounds good. Just thought I would check since unfortunately there is still people who think a RAID setup can replace a backup.
Click to expand...

Understood, thank you. It might afford me a bit of a boost in my sense of security, but still backups must be made. If the buy-in wasn't so cheap for a hardware solution I wouldn't bother most likely but for $50 I figured hey..
 
So, everything works pretty much as planned.

The 3ware card played nicer with my bios and both Windows 7 and Mint15 than I would have thought, though I'm limited to command line card admin stuff in Linux, I can live with that.

One snag I have, sorta, is write speed to the NTFS formatted array in Linux is slooowwww..
A very solid 35MB/Sec. Read speeds seem to be OK. I've spent most of the morning copying the first 600gig of data to the array, and will likely spend most of the afternoon on it as well.
I don't know if this is an NTFS under Linux issue, or a RAID driver issue or what. I'm leaning toward the former. It's a real shame the two can't have a common file system that isn't a drawback to one or the other. While I spend most of my time in Linux, I use media that's stored on that array from Windows more often, so I'm kinda boned I guess. Grr..
 
Native write is 2 or 3x that, depending on file size and such.
I ran the Linux drive benchmark utility included in the Mint drive manager and read speeds were noticeably higher than one of these bare drives, but it was unable to test rear speeds while in an
array. It was at least twice that natively/single drive though.

As for write cache I'm not sure but intent to double check this evening.
It is most definitely running slow for some reason.
 
Ramses said:
Native write is 2 or 3x that, depending on file size and such.
I ran the Linux drive benchmark utility included in the Mint drive manager and read speeds were noticeably higher than one of these bare drives, but it was unable to test rear speeds while in an
array. It was at least twice that natively/single drive though.

As for write cache I'm not sure but intent to double check this evening.
It is most definitely running slow for some reason.
Click to expand...

I also notice transferring from NTFS array to an NTFS drive, the xfer rate is still in the mid 30's, and
there is some CPU usage. Transferring form the NTFS array to an EXT4 drive, xfer rate is over 100mb/sec and much less CPU usage.

I'll reboot and check my controller settings but this is looking like some Linux/NTFS BS at the moment.
sigh


Edit, controller settings are fine, xfers in windows both to and from the NTFS array are fine(130+).
This is a Linux/NTFS issue apparently.
 
Last edited:
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