1TB WD Caviar Black Raid 0 Question

[infinity06]

Not that i am having a problem but i recently set up 2 WD Caviar Black hard drives on a Raid 0 array and i havent noticed much of a performance gain.

My setup consists of the following:

(2) 1TB WD Caviar Black 7200 rpm hard drives
Raid 0 / 128K Stripe
currently with 1% fragmentation

Based on my sig.... would it be better to use Intel raid and try to use the matrix storage thing or just use the gigabyte controller i am currently using?

I have formatted at least 6-7 times over the last 2 weeks looking for a comfortable install because gigabyte's raid drivers ( the drivers on their site) are a little tricky. Once i set up the array in the bios i then go to load windows 7 enterprise which doesnt have a gigabyte driver. I supply the driver gigabyte gives me (via usb stick) and windows tells me that i need to use a 32 bit driver or a signed 64 bit driver. I can't recall the exact work around but i basically keep picking drivers until the drive shows up on the windows drive selection screen. From that point i complete the install.

Attached is a screen shot of my current install and speed.

one thing i do remember is that after a previous install i ran HDTach and got some ridicolus benchmark numbers.... i assumed they were false because i had to run HDTach in xp3 compatability mode...

any thoughts?

[Joeteck]

That because you used the entire drive. The beginning of the drive is the fastest.

If its not too late, re-so the RAID 0, but this time make it a total of 200gig for your boot drive.

And the remainder your data or games drive.

[infinity06]

Isnt that called short stroking? --- To do this can i just reformat and have partition 0 sized at 200gb and then once into windows i can go to disk management and create a partition out of the space thats left? Obviously i will install windows to Partition 0.

[||Console||]

read this =)
http://www.overclockers.com/short-stroke-raid/

[tuskenraider]

At 103MB/s average for 2 drives in RAID0 belies a different problem, as a single drive should put down that number. Your performance has nothing to do with the fact you aren't short stroking the drive and is a foolish suggestion to solve your problem. Make sure write caching is enabled for the array/controller. If that doesn't help, you could try changing the stripe size to 64KB and retest. Personally, I'd move the array to the Intel ports as they have the best performance out of any onboard RAID controllers. Was there some reason you needed to be on the secondary RAID controller? They usually are secondary in performance as well.

[infinity06]

Honestly, i havent been messing with hardware for the last several years and this build was just thrown together over the sumer. Now i have some time on my hands i got back into tweaking and optimizing. Last time i have messed with overclocking or raid was during the Athlon XP Days..

Going back to the above.... i think i may have used a 32 bit driver for the raid controller (if thats even possible). Windows 7 enterprise does not like the gigabyte raid drivers provided by gigabyte.

i am going to move to the Intel controller and create 2 partitions. 200gb for the OS and games and the rest will just be Drive D: for movies and such.

[tuskenraider]

Going back to the above.... i think i may have used a 32 bit driver for the raid controller (if thats even possible). Windows 7 enterprise does not like the gigabyte raid drivers provided by gigabyte.

i am going to move to the Intel controller and create 2 partitions. 200gb for the OS and games and the rest will just be Drive D: for movies and such.Concerning the drivers, if you had the wrong ones, it wouldn't work and you'd BSOD on first boot into Windows, but that doesn't mean that there aren't better ones, likely not. Your plan sounds good.

[EarthDog]

At 103MB/s average for 2 drives in RAID0 belies a different problem, as a single drive should put down that number. Your performance has nothing to do with the fact you aren't short stroking the drive and is a foolish suggestion to solve your problem. Make sure write caching is enabled for the array/controller. If that doesn't help, you could try changing the stripe size to 64KB and retest. Personally, I'd move the array to the Intel ports as they have the best performance out of any onboard RAID controllers. Was there some reason you needed to be on the secondary RAID controller? They usually are secondary in performance as well.+1 to this entire post!

If it was in fact a partition size issue, you would have seen the performance go down across the span of the drive. For some reason, you are pegged across the entire drive. Sounds to me like its a controller issue, not a partition size issue. Those are single drive numbers and are not indicaitive of R0 performance for those drives.

i am going to move to the Intel controller and create 2 partitions. 200gb for the OS and games and the rest will just be Drive D: for movies and such.Just be aware if you are accessing both partitions at the same time, the advantage you gained by short stroking the drive as far as seek times go, will be wiped out. This doesnt happen frequently depending on the type of information on the other partition and how much its accessed. Nothing you can do about that really. But the throughput is still there at least!!

[infinity06]

Well, i have just moved the drives to the Intel controller, set up raid 0 with 2 Partitions and installed Win 7. The numbers are much better!!

Thanks for the advice,

Here are the numbers for 2WD Black Drives in Raid 0 with Volume Write back Caching enabled. I have 2 Partitions, the OS Partition is 200GB and the second partition is 1.62 TB

Can anyone tell me if the attached bench is the entire disk or just the os partition? I believe its the entire disk because it shows the drive as 2000MB.

[EarthDog]

Its the entire disk. You didnt partition it in the Raid setup I believe. You should be right around 200MB transfers with a 200GB partition.

[mattspalace]

Yeah if you did a Raid 0+1 solution with a ~200GB slice for Raid 0 your access time would probably fall to 7ms or so. Basically go as small as you can for the fastest performance. When I was using a couple of 640GB Caviar Blacks, I think my Raid 0 partition was about 160GB. When you do Ctrl-I to get into the Intel Matrix setup, you'll have options for Raid based on the number of drives. You'll be limited to Raid 0+1 with two drives.

[tuskenraider]

Yeah if you did a Raid 0+1 solution with a ~200GB slice for Raid 0 your access time would probably fall to 7ms or so. When working within the 200GB partition, his access times will be the same as a 200GB array, it just can't be benchmarked.......