Vista and Raid 0

Hauk

Platinum Member
Nov 22, 2001
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Me, I'm thinking of 32k but am not sure yet. Need input!
 

Rubycon

Madame President
Aug 10, 2005
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What are you doing with the striped array?

How many drives?

What kind of host?

It depends on so many factors. For best "instant action" results stick with defaults. If you must extract the max performance possible, use a drive image program and start testing with all possible stripe sizes and use the best performing size for your primary application that needs it.
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
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In general:

If you're doing huge bulk sequential reads/writes (as in, say, video editing), you want the biggest stripe size possible. This minimizes seek delays and generally allows slightly higher throughput.

If you know that the application(s) you are using are built to do small aligned reads/writes (database software frequently does this), you should try to size the striping such that most operations will fit into a single stripe. So if your app spends all day reading and writing aligned 4K records, a 4K stripe size would probably be best.

If you don't fit into one of those cases, stick with the default (usually 32K or 64K). Extremely large or small stripes may cause worse performance for some workloads, whereas a size somewhere in the middle is unlikely to be too bad If you want to tune it, you'll either need software to profile your disk accesses, or you can do as suggested above and test it with multiple stripe sizes.
 

Hauk

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Nov 22, 2001
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It's a gaming rig with my mp3s on it as well. 90% gaming though.

I installed it with a 32k size on two 74G raptors and while it's fast, it's accessing a lot. I know Vista is caching and indexing, but damn these things are loud. The opening video to Supreme Commander had them grinding away. Any suggestions, thanks...
 

lamere

Senior member
Jul 22, 2006
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Originally posted by: SteelSix
It's a gaming rig with my mp3s on it as well. 90% gaming though.

I installed it with a 32k size on two 74G raptors and while it's fast, it's accessing a lot. I know Vista is caching and indexing, but damn these things are loud. The opening video to Supreme Commander had them grinding away. Any suggestions, thanks...

raid is useless in a desktop environment, especially gaming, and only usable in a server environment.
truth.:)

that being said, you MIGHT gain a second in load times, at best.

 

Hauk

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Nov 22, 2001
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Yea, I'm coming to that realization. My load times haven't noticibly improved. More bragging rights than anything. I got a good deal on two 16mb 74G Raptors and decided to try it.

I'll keep Raid 0 but I think I'm gonna bump up stripe size to 1024 so both drives aren't grinding away during OS file access. Pointless.

Vista reinstall and reconfig 2nite. Half the fun right? :disgust:
 

Slammy1

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Apr 8, 2003
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With standard Windows programs you won't see a big difference, which is not to say not noticeable. Things definitely jump on the screen faster. I run 32k on mine as it's a compromise between larger and smaller clusters. I played with PQ Magic to dynamically optimize my clusters, but quickly found out that's not a good way to do it. If you can image to a third drive, it seems the best way to play with clusters as someone mentioned. Never really went back to it, though I have benched larger and smaller and ended up where I'm at (I'm not advocating benches as a way to discern performance, just 2 years ago it seemed a good idea). A better test is to time a file copy or run whatever app lead you to RAID in the first place

I think RAID has its place in the world, but if you don't do a lot of large file manipulation it seems pointless (even problematic if you lose the array, they are just a bit less stable than individual drives). I remember, for example, losing a SCSI chain to Nero 4 (it had its own software for my card. Without redundancy backups are more critical.

EDIT: I run 32k not 23... I was sooo tired last night.