1 or 2 IDE cables when raid 0?

[Perre]

I'm wondering if I shall use 1 IDE-cable on both of my disks which im going to run in raid 0 or shall I have one each?

I'm using a AbitIT7max with 2x Western Digital 120GB 8mb cache....

btw what clustersize should I use? 64k which is default or ...?

[Xaotic]

If you have two channels, by all means use 2 cables. This will allow simultaneous access to both drives and will likely give better performance to the disk subsystem.

Cluster size is determined by the format of the drives. NTFS will use smaller clusters and yield more efficient use of space. What you're thinking of is stripe size. If this is your boot array, I'd probably try a smaller stripe, but the only way to tell for sure is to experiment. Larger stripes tend to give better performance with larger files and smaller stripes with smaller files.

[slater3333uk]

You will need to use 2 differant cables. I dont think raid works when you have a master and slave setup

[ajrettke]

no it will work with both drives on one cable (atleast for every controller I've used). But you will get incredibly poor performance with RAID arrays when 2 IDE drives are on one channel. It will probably be slower than a single drive!

[FunkDaMonkMan]

Originally posted by ajrettke
no it will work with both drives on one cable (atleast for every controller I've used). But you will get incredibly poor performance with RAID arrays when 2 IDE drives are on one channel. It will probably be slower than a single drive!

Yes, because the advantage of RAID is the ability to write to both drives simultaneously. With one as master and one as slave, they would have to take turns writing and reading across the IDE cable. A single drive would be able to transfer the data, but the RAID array would have to take turns, thus slowing it down to speeds less than a single drive.

^ That's my understanding on it anyway.

[Sonny]

Originally posted by Perre
I'm wondering if I shall use 1 IDE-cable on both of my disks which im going to run in raid 0 or shall I have one each?

One HDD per controller/channel is your best option, as already mentioned the benefit of RAID0 is to be able to read or write data on 2 separate HDDs.

Originally posted by Perre
I'm using 2x 120GB WD disks which I'm setting up in raid 0. I've already tried to install xp once on my disks in raid 0 it seems to work fine, but I only get 1500 in pcmark2002 and 41k in sisoftsandra. I'm using a Abit IT7max with its onboard HighPoint raidcontroller (374).

About the clustersize, I'm a bit confused.... 64k is default when I'm creating the array. Shall I change that? I mostly use my computer for playing games and watching movies....if that has anything to do which clustersize I shall use....

About the drivers...I've read something about matching the drivers for the raid onboardcontroller? I'm lost when it comes to such things...

I'm currently downloading the latest drivers from highpoint...


I wouldnt trust PCMark for HDDs benchmarking. The most trusted is INTEL IOMETER 2003.05.10 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/iometer/) but if you cant figure how to use that(join the club:o) ATTO (http://www.attotech.com/software/files/eptscsi.exe) is your next best choice.

That's not cluster size that your talking about, what you have in mind is STRIPE SIZE & yes 64K is default for most HP RAID Controller Chips. Try a 16K stripe with NTFS using the default 4K cluster size if your on XP SP1. One thing that I have noticed is that the bigger the drive gets it seems to like bigger stripes as well, I have no explanation why but for some 80G Maxtors they seem to like 32K Stripe & 4K Clusters. If you have the chance do play with as many combinations as you can. If you want to try different cluster sizes in your file system I can show you how to change that too.

The latest official IT7 - MAX2 BIOS is D7 which has HP RAID BIOS of 1.22 so you will want the HP RAID Driver 1.22 which isnt the latest RAID BIOS or Driver. Do not use the 3.XX series on the 1.22 RAID BIOS.

[Perre]

Thank you very much :P

Well I didn't have patience enough to wait around for any real answers so I reformated my drives and used 32k stripe size. I'm not sure if si softsandra is a reliable benchprogram but anway....the decrease from 64 to 32 in stripsize took me from 41k points to 57k in sandra. =)!!

I downloaded ATTO benchmark on my brothers computer yesterday during my windowns installation, BUT somehow I forgott about it and when my brother came home he saw the file on the desktop and without knowing what it was he deleted it *arrggghhh* :( well I guess I have to download it again.

About smaller stripe size I read this on storage review:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=StripeSize

I don't have IT7 MAX2 but only MAX...same BIOS? Guess I'll check that up...

Meantime thanx guys :P

[Sonny]

Knowing ABIT they are probably using 1.22, you can check this when you see the RAID BIOS Load Screen.

[Perre]

I've downloaded the 1.22 BIOS and will install it later on. By the way what settings shall I use when I bench in ATTO?

[Sonny]

Do not do that. DO NOT try to flash the BIOS of the RAID Controller Chip on your MoBo. If you mean DRIVER then it shouldve been done when you installed, if your updating good luck:beer:

ATTO SETTINGS (http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=201920)

[YviE]

Isn't it possible to flash the BIOS of the on-board RAID controller seperately from the one of the mobo?
I've never tried it. but i used to have this little utility that allows to extract the bios of the raid controller and replace with another one.

[Sonny]

Modding a MoBo's BIOS to include a more recent version of RAID BIOS is a much more preferable practice.

With the HP374 you dont want to go past 1.22 because the newer RAID BIOS willl not allow you to create a RAID0 array, it will recognize a previous array but it will not create a new one.

[Perre]

Here's a bench from ATTO


ATTO (http://www.nordiccrew.com/majestic/atto1.jpg)

[Sonny]

First thing is to remove the link in your sig. That is againts forums rules.



I'm sure that your happy with that result.

[Perre]

yeah sure... got it

is that score about normal?

[Perre]

?

[Sonny]

Those are better than normal, I say they are great:beer:

[Perre]

ok, thanx. Then I'm satisfyed :P