Nvidia RAID 0

[Dawgdoc]

Helping a friend out with setting up his system.

This is a 4 X 250gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 with Nvidia RAID 0 on an EVGA 780i FTW mobo.

I helped him set up raid over a VOIP (Ventrilo) and he installed windows himself.

He says he has checked the jumpers to make sure he is getting his full 3.0Gb/s xfer rate.

What do you think of this HD benchmark?

CPU usage looks WAY to high, and IMHO I think the speed is crap.

What do you think? Suggestions?

http://img166.imageshack.us/my.php?image=hdtuneos8.jpg

[doublejack]

I honestly think that looks OK. nvraid is a software raid, so by nature it's going to have a pretty big CPU load. And the transfer rates look decent to me.

[Dawgdoc]

Isnt the burst rate supposed to be higher than the average though?

[tuskenraider]

Is Disk Caching enabled in the Device Manager? Should be under one of the disk/RAID controller groups.

[Dawgdoc]

Is Disk Caching enabled in the Device Manager? Should be under one of the disk/RAID controller groups.

I do not believe so....how do I tell my friend how to find this?

[tuskenraider]

I do not believe so....how do I tell my friend how to find this?Right-click My Computer, select Manage, then select Device Manager. Then look under all the relevent hard drive(Disk Drives, SCSI and RAID Controllers, IDE/SATA Devices) groups and there should be a check box on one of the tabs. For my Intel RAID it is under Disk Drives and I select RaptorRAID0, nVidia may be similar, or not.

[Madwand]

Yes, you should in theory be able to get much faster transfer rates. I suggest trying a smaller stripe size. Here's an illustration of 3-drive nVIDIA RAID 0, 16 KiB stripe size vs. 128 KiB (16 KiB was faster). The drives are slower than 7200.10's.

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k203/Madwand0/3RAID0-16kvs128k-small.png

Here are some results from 4x RAID 0 (with a mix of drives), also showing the effects of a crippled HTT speed setting.

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k203/Madwand0/4xRaid0-16k-2mHTTvs8mHTT.png

The above were with nForce 3/430. Subsequent nForce implementations might have their own issues.

[Dawgdoc]

Any other suggestions for my friend?

We checked his disk caching and it WAS enabled.

I have to admit I do not do much Nvidia RAID so I really dont have much to compare to. Intel RAID sure.....Nvidia RAID not so much.

So what is the consensus here? This RAID setup looks like it is performing well or not? Any other suggestions for improved performance?

Thanks again.

[tuskenraider]

No, it's not performing well at all. I'd break the array down to two drives and see what kind of results you get. This is where an imaging program would be invaluable. Could be a "bad" drive bringing the array's performance down.

[Dawgdoc]

What type of imaging program are you referring to?

So you would suggest making a 2 disk array and installing windows on that and reperforming benchmarks? And then repeating with the other 2 drives to hopefully find a drive that is faulty or isolate the drives more?

Im not sure this individual is going to be up for that, but I can certainly suggest it.

Any other ideas/suggestions welcomed.

Thanks again guys :)

[Madwand]

I'd suggest getting a PATA drive, installing the OS on that, and then fooling around with RAID configurations, particularly stripe size. I personally prefer to keep the OS off RAID, but once you've figured out the performance issues, if you wanted to you could choose to re-install the OS on the RAID array.

[tuskenraider]

What type of imaging program are you referring to?

So you would suggest making a 2 disk array and installing windows on that and reperforming benchmarks? And then repeating with the other 2 drives to hopefully find a drive that is faulty or isolate the drives more?

Im not sure this individual is going to be up for that, but I can certainly suggest it.

Any other ideas/suggestions welcomed.

Thanks again guys :)Acronis True Image Home (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/) is good and has a 15-day trial. Unfortunately, your friend will have some work cut out for him to get to the bottom of his problem. If he doesn't want to dedicate the time then RAID probably isn't for him, which sounds like the case, but it'll certainly be valuable lesson on the benefits of a solid backup plan and RAID troubleshooting. An imaging program is a RAID0 users best friend as a somewhat lengthy Windows reinstall to test the drives wouldn't be necessary, it would be a one time 20 minute exercise to image his current install and then 20 minutes to redeploy the image on each new RAID array. The catch at this point is he needs a 5th drive to store that image on and redeploy back to the RAID array.

[Dawgdoc]

Thanks Tusken I appreciate the info.

Im not saying my friend cant/wont do what is recommended/necessary, but he is somewhat new to computer building and not entirely sure how far he wants to pursue this.

Hopefully he will be signing up here soon and contributing with his own information since I really cant speak for him with regards to his willingness to do XYZ.

I will pass the information along though :)

Now....just for my own information, what exactly is the Acronis True Image program going to tell us about RAID and where the problems(s) might be?

[Mr.Guvernment]

Acronis wont tell you anything

it is an imaging program, it will make an image of your harddrives - which you then burn to DVD's , this way you can reinstall your entire OS, drivers and everything with an "image" instead of reinstalling windows all over again, installing drivers all over again and all that crap.


i know NVIDIA raid is not as good as intels ICH, but even with raid 0 you should be seeing at least 2-3x the average transfer speeds with 4 drives in raid 0 vs 1 drives speed


i have 3 x 80G seagate 7200.10 drives in raid 0 and i get 184MB average and 2400G burst. on ICH9R

[tuskenraider]

Thanks Tusken I appreciate the info.

Im not saying my friend cant/wont do what is recommended/necessary, but he is somewhat new to computer building and not entirely sure how far he wants to pursue this.

Hopefully he will be signing up here soon and contributing with his own information since I really cant speak for him with regards to his willingness to do XYZ.

I will pass the information along though :)

Now....just for my own information, what exactly is the Acronis True Image program going to tell us about RAID and where the problems(s) might be?No problem. The answer is nothing. It does disk imaging. Since, as your aware, RAID setups can sometimes be volitile, it is a valuable thing to have. Whether you are using RAID or a single drive, having a backup image of your OS/app hard drive allows you to recover quickly from drive failure or data loss. You can incrementally update the backup as time goes on and you add more programs/data/updates or have multiple backups at these various points. It's also great to allow you test different RAID and small hardware changes as well, as you don't have to do a full reinstall of the OS and testing programs/benchmarks everytime you change something. You spend just 20 minutes reimaging your backup, sometimes less, sometimes more depending on the size of the backup and speed of the machine. My 18GB backup takes 8 minutes to fully restore. In the end you basically have a "fresh" system everytime you restore your image. For every system I build for various family members and friends I keep an image for them because I know six months down the line they've got their machine all hosed up with spyware and whatnot and spending a little bit of time to reimage it, instead of playing around with spyware and virus removal programs, is much easier.

[venemous]

Hey everyone, i finally signed up!
Thanks for the suggestions and such ..much appreciated.
Now that im here it should be alot easier to communicate and Doc wouldnt have to think what my answer to a certain suggestion would be :P

Right now im VERY pressed for time..ive got 2 Final exams to take and i dont have the time for troubleshooting.
I should be free a week from now...Also ill need a HD so i can use the True Image software..I suggest we revive this thread when im done with my exams and i have a new HD, or i could just use 1 of the 4 drives and make a 3 disk RAID..would there be any difference other than size of the RAID?

[tuskenraider]

No. Running 3 drives in RAID0 and the extra for data storage would be a good idea. What were you hoping to improve with the RAID0 setup? I've seen a couple of tests/threads here in the past about the dropoff in real application performance with RAID0 setups after 3 drives, it just doesn't infinately scale upward.

[venemous]

the reason im doing a RAID0 is because i was hoping to increase my systems performance when i game. I not sure i understood what you meant by it doesnt infinately scale upward..

[Dawgdoc]

He used 4 drives at my suggestion.

To be honest, Ive gotten some INSANE speed with 4 drive intel RAID, but that was also with Matrix Raid 0/5

Just for a little teaser/comparison here is the RAID 0 partition of aforementioned array. I wish I had saved a HDtune benchmark of this system but all I can find right now is a HDtach.....

http://i268.photobucket.com/albums/jj5/Dawgdoc999/HDTach.jpg

[tuskenraider]

the reason im doing a RAID0 is because i was hoping to increase my systems performance when i game. I not sure i understood what you meant by it doesnt infinately scale upward..I mean as you add drives the performance doesn't increase equally as you add more drives. With benchmarks moreso, but certainly not in real world app/gaming usage.

He used 4 drives at my suggestion.

To be honest, Ive gotten some INSANE speed with 4 drive intel RAID, but that was also with Matrix Raid 0/5

I see. Speed in a benchmark is certainly a tool with which you can determine if everything is running properly within the storage subsystem as we are doing now, but it certainly can't tell what impact it may have on application usage. Anyway I don't think the loss will be noticed pulling one drive out of the array to better serve the user as data backup when catastophe strikes, but that's up to you guys to decide.

[Mr.Guvernment]

your gaming WONT get faster with raid 0 ALL raid 0 will do is make large files load faster, THAT is it, you wont get some magical boost iN FPS or anything..

a fast raid array may get you onto a new map fast if you have it, may start the game faster.. and if you play games that do alot of loading from the HD, will be faster. but FPS wont get jack for improvement

[Dawgdoc]

Correct regarding FPS boost and RAID but most/all online games HEAVILY load from the hard drive.

Every time you zone, etc.......

Decreasing those load times is a HUGE benefit.