Just want your opinion on my HDTune results.

[jmdixon85]

http://i464.photobucket.com/albums/rr8/jmdixon85/hdtune.jpg

Using the drives in my sig (Enterprise class drives)

All look ok?

[shadowdr]

It looks OK for an nvidia array. It does seem a little slow but the block size in HD Tune might be different then the stripe size of your array. It also appears that with 15% cpu usage that something else was running in the background. Enabling write back cach also can make a big difference in benchmarks but not so much in actual Windows performance. Reading and writing larg files with a high sustained transfer speed are what makes an array appear so fast, but just average performance (in the instance of benchmarks) with a smaller stripe size may benifit most of the tasks windows does.

I mostly use benchmarks like HDTune, HDTach and Atto as a performance baseline. If my benchmark speed diminishes over a period of time it could indicate a problem, be it drivers, corruption or a bad sector on a disk. I would try Atto and HDTach because HDTune may not be as forgiving with Nvidia arrays as Intels.

[kraven]

Your results seem on par with the others that have been posted. Are you not noticing a difference in real world performance?

[jmdixon85]

Going from a single disk to RAID array has seemed to offer little to no performance increase for me. Even When booting Vista and loading programs. A few years back now I had a RAID array with 2 80GB spinpoints and the increase in performance was very noticable. But I suppose I didn't have 4GB RAM back then. As far the high CPU usage that will be my dreamscene, Sidebar etc, running. I used a block size of 128k, Should I use 64k the same as my RAID array?

[freeagent]

if you were using intel raid, you would for sure notice a difference :)

im at work right now, but i think im getting better performace with my old seagate 320, ill have to check when i get home..

[shadowdr]

Going from a single disk to RAID array has seemed to offer little to no performance increase for me. Even When booting Vista and loading programs. A few years back now I had a RAID array with 2 80GB spinpoints and the increase in performance was very noticable. But I suppose I didn't have 4GB RAM back then. As far the high CPU usage that will be my dreamscene, Sidebar etc, running. I used a block size of 128k, Should I use 64k the same as my RAID array?

128 is probably about right, just saying if graph looks worse then you expect changing block size in configuration can make a hugh difference.

[visbits]

If the block size match, I think those drives would average around 160Mb/s if not more.

I didn't know block size was so important, glad I read this thread. :)

[jmdixon85]

Well im currenly recording TV on my PC so I will change the block size to 64 and post the results but i'm not expecting 160mb/s

[jmdixon85]

http://i464.photobucket.com/albums/rr8/jmdixon85/hdtune2-1.jpg

Here are the results with a 64k block setting. The burst mode seems really low to me for 2 SATAII drives. The drives should be running in SATA2 mode as I removed the jumpers that limit them to SATA 1. I can't seem to verify that they are in SATA2 mode using sisoft sandra. Does anyone know of any software that can tell whet mode they are in, even tho they are in a RAID array?

[I7_Guru]

The burst is the last thing you want to pay attention to.

I would say that your numbers are a little on the low side. I'm not too familiar nor have ever worked with the Nvidia RAID though, so this may be normal.

To be honest though, it seems like you would get the same results with just one drive hooked up.

[shadowdr]

The burst is the last thing you want to pay attention to.

I would say that your numbers are a little on the low side. I'm not too familiar nor have ever worked with the Nvidia RAID though, so this may be normal.

To be honest though, it seems like you would get the same results with just one drive hooked up.
He is right burst speed is dependent on cach size but makes little difference except in benches. Here are my raptors one with 64 block size and one with 128. It just shows that there can be descrpancies in any benchmark. According to my results yours are a little better.

[Mr.Guvernment]

raid 0 often doesnt boot windows much faster as seek times dont increase

Raid 0 is great for larger file transfers and such, but smaller seeks, it doesnt excel on, you would notice better performance from a single drive like a raptor or something with low seek times.

intel raid or not, raid 0 doesnt boost OS load times alot, nor many program loads since most are very small to begin with and dont saturate even a single drive in loading.