Need help with Raid0 stripes array thingy...

Yo!
I'm running on raid0 stripes with 80+80 gb seagate, excatly the same hds. 2 mb cache.
Isn't it supposed to be shorten out the loading times etc? in games?
It's only making my computer slower... why?
My dudes comp is loading even faster with just a 80gb seagate.
Why? Need help fast. :/ plz help out.

RAID-0 will not help with gaming load times. Games are more dependant on random seek and RAID-0 is slower at that than a single HDD.

I pray you didn't partition your RAID-0 drive.

Partitioning doesn't harm raid at all.
It depends how you configure it.
Also loading in the begining of drive is faster then in the end.
Read here about partitionoing.

What is the stripe size you use?

Also what is your cpu speed?

And the most important - how much is your ram?

If it is less then 512MB and the game is UT2003 - that's your main problem. The newest 3d games require 512MB for playing without swapping.

There are many reasons for slow loading of games.

I have partioned it and all that... ;|
my cpu speed is at [email protected].
will the game load faster if I have it on 3.0 ghz rather than 2.4?
I have 512 mb of ram... will it load faster with 1024mb of ram?
plz tell me how to get the fastest loading time man... if you will and have the time. thx

stripe size? what you mean with that
look at this... if I have 10000 rpm hd with the games and win on, and another, let's say 120 gb for storage. will the games load faster etc?

If you have already 512 MB ram I doubt 1024 will help.
Also your CPU speed is more then great.
The faster the cpu the better the gameplay but the loading time doesn't depend that much on the cpu.

So memory, cpu and video card are fine.

About stripe size.
How did you create the raid?

Raid requires a controler. Some motherboards have raid chip build in on to them. Other option is separate raid (PCI) card.

Then you have to connect both drives on separate channels (cables) to the raid controller. Preferably with nothing else on these channel.
I have my cd drives on ide channels 1 and 2. And 2 hard drives on the raid ide channels 3 and 4. (On my mobo only 3 and 4 channels are raid).
Then I create a raid-0 array from both hdds. Raid-0 is fro stripping - it creates a vurtual drive and when reading and writing it splits the data (files) in 2 portions - 1 portion goes to 1 drive and the second to the other drive. This way both drives write half the data simultaneously so it takes half the time. So raid-0 of 2 drives is (in theory) twice faster then a single drive.

Stripe size is how big is the portion which goes to a drive from a raid array.
Usualy most users choose 16kb. So if you save a file of 64kb the first 16kb go to the first drive, the second 16 to the second drive, the 3rd 16kb to the first drive and the 4th 16kb the second.
But if the file is just 16kb it goes only to 1 drive so it is not twice faster.

Anyway when you create the array you choose the stripe size.

I would ask you to test what your current speed of the raid array is.
Benchmark it with atto:
http://www.attotech.com/software/files/eptscsi.exe

and post a pic of the results.
You can compare them with other results here
http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=201920

Pla said:

Partitioning doesn't harm raid at all.
It depends how you configure it.

Click to expand...

Read it. Partitions on RAID is extreme stress on the HDDs that already have to sync.

4 Partitions is like 4 HDDs with just one head. It kills your random seek time which is the performance you see the most.

Your system though.

I only noticed a speed increase in sustained transfers when I went to RAID 0. Now that I'm back on single drives that advantage is gone, but I'm also seeing a small increase in random access performance.