Ok...Any Raid advice (atto benches inside)

spldart · Feb 19, 2004

Ok. I like doing video editing. I needed some speed.
I was stuck with ata100 devices on ide0 for some time.
They scored:

I finally put in a Promise TX2000 controller with two WD Caviar 80 gig 7200 rpm 8meg cache drives.
I reduced my FSB in order to have the upmost stability with this unknown card and scored:

There is an obvious improvement there but is it what I should be seeing?
Are there any tweaks anybody can recommend?
BTW this card is in one of my 64/66 slots in my dually.

And advice at all since I'm new to Raid would be appreciated.
Or should I just shut up and be happy with this score?

Thanks

nikhsub1 · Feb 19, 2004

Rerun that test but change the total length to 32MB instead of 4MB.

theELVISCERATOR · Feb 19, 2004

and queu depth to 10............

spldart · Feb 19, 2004

There yah go, 35 10. What are these numbers telling me and is there anything I can do to tweak the setup for max performance?
I will be running my fsb back up after I'm confy this setup is stable.

spldart · Feb 19, 2004

Oops...Folding was running in the background off of C: Would this have thrown off my D:Raid scores much?

cmcquistion · Feb 19, 2004

For working with large files (like video editing), large stripe sizes (in the RAID array) are usually better.

(the only two cents I have...)

stan03 · Feb 19, 2004

spldart said:
Oops...Folding was running in the background off of C: Would this have thrown off my D:Raid scores much?

yes, it does for me

spldart · Feb 20, 2004

I killed folding for this run. I still have some other stuff in the background but those shouldn't be disk accessing at that time.
Tomorrow after work I'll ramp up the fsb and do some more tests but with no apps at all open or in the background except windows.

cmcquistion · Feb 20, 2004

Can't see any of the pictures you've posted.

stan03 · Feb 20, 2004

i can see them fine, the scores seem about right

spldart · Feb 20, 2004

I host on port 91 since I can't get my web server app to get out on 80. I'm thinking it may be the cable modem is designed to prevent me from doing that. Dunno.
If you're behind a firewall you will probably not see them.
And there is the occasional server reboot

cmcquistion · Feb 20, 2004

spldart said:
If you're behind a firewall you will probably not see them.

That is probably it.

*EDIT* I'm running a Linux Firewall (Clarkconnect). I use the Clarkconnect machine as a firewall (NAT, router, DNS, DHCP), webserver, and email server.

stan03 · Feb 20, 2004

i use a firewall and i can see them.... but its software firewall... i guess its different?

spldart · Feb 20, 2004

Here is the last score I posted above:
Length 32
que 10

.5 w 7168 r 8516
1 w 430 r 16906
2 w 17756 r 30847
4 w 36263 r 55038
8 w 51227 r 52842
16 w 62659 r 64184
32 w 70705 r 53568
64 w 76433 r 83676
128 w 77852 r 63161
256 w 77314 r 66444
512 w 77852 r 62137
1024 w 77136 r 59520

For those behind a firewall

spldart · Feb 20, 2004

Holy crap!
I clocked the dually up to max OC and the controller is running real stable so far.
I have 6 instances of DVD2AVI running at the same time working on 40 gig of media on D:raid and still get good access to windows on the C drive. I'm absolutely punishing this array and no problems. And FAST. I should have tried harder to get an array set up a long time ago.

I was told that these larger stripe block sizes are not as good in benchmarks as smaller so I guess It just wont score quite as high as it could. I'm still happy

spldart · Feb 20, 2004

OK...Atto shows no gain when I ran my FSB up. That leads me to believe that the bus and card interface aren't the issue but I'm actually running these two drives at their limit. Since these two drives are ata100 and the card is 133 I'm figuring that I may see some improvement if I get 4 drives or if I switch to 133s. But that experiment is down the road a ways.

shadowdr · Feb 21, 2004

Fear not,like you said a large stripe size will not bench as well as one with a smaller one but if your defragger actually moves your most used files to the front of the disc then your array will get faster as it progresses through it's normal stages.

spldart · Feb 21, 2004

shadowdr said:
Fear not,like you said a large stripe size will not bench as well as one with a smaller one but if your defragger actually moves your most used files to the front of the disc then your array will get faster as it progresses through it's normal stages.

So...As the beginning of the discs fill and i start working more in the middle of the discs the array will be a bit faster? Or did I misunderstand?
I hadn't heard this before so I'm very curious.

cmcquistion · Feb 21, 2004

Actually, your disk transfer rates will be better at the beginning of the disk, then at the end.

I think what he means is that if you defrag regularly, your overall read performance will be better, if it is often reading files from the disk, because the defragger should put the files most often accessed, close together, at the beginning of the disk.

spldart · Feb 21, 2004

Oh ok. So the Benchies I did with Raid fresh and empty are probably the best I'll see then.
I do have one more thing to try though

Ok...Any Raid advice (atto benches inside)

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