[bing]

This thread is like a shared blog about this matrix raid, and there are a lot of infos & experiences from many other matrix raid users starting like my humble 2 cheap drives up to 6 (yeah, six) raided solid state iRam drives !
Just get a cup of coffee before you read through this gigantic thread !

Cheer !
Bing

Quick summary if you're asking "What is this all about ?" or lazy to read through all this long thread.

It is all about exploiting the best or speediest part of the hard drives (mininum 2) for best performance using the built in Intel south bridge chip AND use the slower part for data protection in Raid 1 / 5 or 10 (depends how many drives you use).

Currently this feature only available for Intel ICHxR Intel South Bridge chip and Areca Raid controller.

Layman term : "Slicing out the yummy topping from 2 or more drives to deliver better performance than just ordinary Raid 0".
Hey, I did that when I was a kid on other's birthday party.

Picture worth millio ........and so on...

EDIT : Also if you're on 4 drives, it can be RAID 5 or RAID 10 for the lower green part.

PS: Yes, it is not a holy grail for everybody, it is advisable that you read through the posts or post a question here if its really fit in your requirements.

Hi ! My 1st post here, sharing result on my 7200.10 Seagate perpendicular drive.

Software onboard raid using Intel Matrix Raid on two 7200.10 250GB which are two volumes at two physical disks -> Raid 0=80 G (boot/system drive) + Raid 1=192G (data drive).

Both disk's jumpers are disconnected to enable 3Gb transfer speed, it was connected (force to 1.5 GB) by factory default.

So far the noise and heat performance is excellent compared to my past experience with 7200.9 & 7200.7 family.

These are the results using two popular benchmark softwares :

Raid 0 , avg. seek is good since it is on narrow short stroked area, and burst speed is fast ! Yes, though it was from the cache, not mechanical but it beats SCSI Ultra 320.
This volume is designated for fast loader such as OS, programs & virtual memory. Found this is the best combination thru lot of pains (reformat, resizing & OS installs). The front faster region of the disk is perfect this purpose and also the burst speed is started to degrade above 100GB region. Ghost/disk image on the fresh installed OS captured for future recovery just in case !




Raid 1, not bad considered only for data




Raid 0




Raid 1




Raid 0 setup, Note: "Write Back Cache" must be manually enabled to get high burst transfer speed and it was disabled by default.




Raid 1 setup




Example Disk 0 detail

[synthetic_fenix]

Very Nice, i see the cache helps out a lot. I see that with mirroring though it doesnt seem to matter mcuh with the cache, it drops it down to the performance of just one of the drives.

[bing]

Originally Posted by synthetic_fenix

Very Nice, i see the cache helps out a lot. I see that with mirroring though it doesnt seem to matter mcuh with the cache, it drops it down to the performance of just one of the drives.

Yep, for RAID 1 the performance is on par with single drive, but at my previous test on single drive (same drive), the burst performance was half compared to this RAID 1 setup. Seek time & CPU utilization was roughly the same.

[synthetic_fenix]

I know im enjoying the speed of just one 320Gb drive of that series. I just got it in yesterday, bought it to put in placed of my 160s I had in Raid0. the performance difference is negligible. I wanted to get away from raid because I want to Dual boot windows and linux and i couldnt do that with running raid.

[jeffp83]

That RAID0 setup spanks my two ADFD Rap's in read MB/sec.. those 7200.10's are definetely impressive!

[nd4spdbh2]

wait you have 2 drives but 2 raid arrays on thoes drives... i dont quite get it but DAMN thoes are some CRAZY benchies

[bing]

Originally Posted by nd4spdbh2

wait you have 2 drives but 2 raid arrays on thoes drives... i dont quite get it but DAMN thoes are some CRAZY benchies

Yes, the burst transfer is reaching 1 GB/sec and the linear transfer speed is almost constant 160MB/sec from 0 to 80 GB/end of the volume.

Courtesy of Intel

Simple, it needs only 2 physical drives as above illustration and no other additional software or hardware invesment. Although they recommend OS & important data in the RAID 1 setup for protection, for me I decided to put the OS and apps in RAID 0 to gain a "very fast" OS boot time which still make me ga..ga.. everytimes I boot my rig.

Well, I was also a noob in this raidee thingee until I read this page -> What is Matrix RAID?

Heck, don't care if the Raid 0 failed, it can easily restored by purchase another new drive which is cheap and use the fresh installed OS image that I had saved.

Btw these 2 babies cost me only $170, quite amazing isn't it ?

-

[nd4spdbh2]

oh its intels matrix raid... not the old stuf... that is just FREAKIN AMAZING... FREAKIN AMAZING.... i mean 1GB/s burst... 160MB/s sequential... thats WAY better than some raptors ... and the price per gig is WAY less ... i cant imagine 4 of these drives with this matrix raid stuff.
heck even that random access time is close to raptors of about 7.7ms


how fast does ur right boot...


oh and by n e chance do you kno the stripe size of the raid 0 array.

[bing]

Originally Posted by nd4spdbh2

oh its intels matrix raid... not the old stuf... that is just FREAKIN AMAZING... FREAKIN AMAZING.... i mean 1GB/s burst... 160MB/s sequential... thats WAY better than some raptors ... and the price per gig is WAY less ... i cant imagine 4 of these drives with this matrix raid stuff.
heck even that random access time is close to raptors of about 7.7ms.

Have to admit Raptor access is still superior 7.7ms vs 9.3 ms, but with 4 of this drives and make them Raid 0 only at the front part of the disk (not all) to make em short stroked, I believe the result will be awesome, "prolly" beats Raptor seek time as well since they're on narrow gap of the best performance of the drive region.

Wondering what the max. burst will be ? 2 GByte/sec ? Is this possible for SATA II spec ?

how fast does ur right boot....

12 seconds, actually 11.7xx something using my handphone stopwatch. Is this considered fast ? or just mediocre ? At least for me it is very fast.

Measurement method :

- AMI BIOS -> set "Quick Boot" to "disable" so it will shows the waiting message for booting -> "Press <ESC> to boot ... (with count down) to ease me to set the start time measurement.

- While on the "Press <ESC> to boot..." BIOS message, ready the stopwatch and ready to press the ESC button.

- Pressed ESC button to start before the count expired and once the motherboard beep right after ESC was pressed, the stopwatch started and the HD disk light was blinking loading the OS.

- Windows XP booting screen started with the scrolling blue bars, noted it needed 3.5 times scrolling left to right.

- After 3.5 scollings, the screen went blank for a very short moment and once the XP login screen pop up on the screeen, the stopwatch was stopped and showed 11.7xxx.

Hope this method shows you what you're looking for.

Oh yeah, the result on this 12 seconds was on XP which is not fresh since it got dozens of apps installed such as Photoshop CS2, MS-Office and other registry hogging applications and for sure a lot of startup stuff like non standard services.

Although I didn't record it, I believe for fresh & clean installed XP it was faster, maybe 10 or 11 seconds. 2 or 3 seconds difference ? I can live with that !

oh and by n e chance do you kno the stripe size of the raid 0 array.

See my captured screeen at Intel Matrix Console above for Vol0_Raid0, it is set 128K. After hours of resetting & OS reinstalls and brief benchmarks using HDTach, as recommended, 128K is the best compared to others like 64K or 32K.

Important note for others who want to try Intel Raid setup :
- Get the latest driver from Intel site, in my case, the ASUS supplied drivers even at their web site is outdated and their performance sux.
- Make sure you enable the "Write Back Cache" to boost the burst speed, it was disabled by default !
- Especially for 7200.10 drive, remove that damn 1.5G limiting jumper !

-

[qwerty11]

Do you know if it is possible to do a raid 0 and raid 1 on two drives without the matrix raid? ( i got nforce 4 raid )
or just raid 0 and the rest normal?

[nd4spdbh2]

WOW that is one quick boot.... and i dont think you can do 2 different raid arrays on 2 disks on n e other thing becides intels matrix thingy.


hey have you tried using tunexp... it will cut alot of that time away... it moves the boot files to the edge of the disk where data can be transfered the fastest

[bing]

Originally Posted by nd4spdbh2

WOW that is one quick boot.... and i dont think you can do 2 different raid arrays on 2 disks on n e other thing becides intels matrix thingy.

Yeah, I think it won't work with non Intel chipset. Dunno, maybe those non Intel could make it in the future since its just software tweaks right ?

Sorry Qwerty11, not sure how to do that on nVidia chipset or other non Intel !

hey have you tried using tunexp... it will cut alot of that time away... it moves the boot files to the edge of the disk where data can be transfered the fastest

Now boot times takes 11 seconds !!

Actually it was ranging from 10.6 to 10.9 after 5 to 6 boots with consistent result, and the scrolling boot progress bar is now 3 cycles instead of 3.5.
Again, though only 1 second increase after re-arrange the boot files using TuneXP, it is still quite impressive result and I don't believe it can make even further more.

Maybe future/new Raptor with 3Gb interface at 3 or 4 drives RAID 0 will make it below 10 seconds. Dooh.....since when I'm starting to be so anal about boot times in seconds resolution eh ?

Thanks for the information on TuneXP, never even take a look for those kind of "optimizer" cause never trust em in the past, but this one really makes some differences.


-

[greenmaji]

@bling.. what chipset motherboard are you using and what chipsets does this work with?

The model of your motherboard would be helpfull

Heck, It would be nice to know what you have in your rig

[bing]

Originally Posted by greenmaji

@bling.. what chipset motherboard are you using and what chipsets does this work with?

The model of your motherboard would be helpfull

Heck, It would be nice to know what you have in your rig

Dooh....sorry, was so excited with this new 7200.10 performance !

Actually my rig is nuthing compared to other high end rigs arounds, here we go my "value" rig detail :

OS : WinXP Pro SP2
Mobo : ASUS P5LD2-VM DH (pretty mainstream with w/ built in GFX)
Chipset : NB = Intel 945G; SB = Intel 82801GR/GH aka ICH7 DH (the latest Intel 975/965 are much more better)
CPU : P4 D805 @ 2.66 Ghz / FSB 533Mhz ; idle:37 C ; load:48 C (standard speed & no plan to OC)
HSF : Intel stock cooler running at constant speed below 2500 RPM by speedfan to maintain low noise
RAM : 1 GB; 2 X Corsair Value Select 512MB DDR2 533 (@standard speed)
GFX : el cheapo free on board 945G & don't plan to play 3D games on it
HD : As above config -> 2 X Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB P/N:ST3250820AS (deliver more than my expectation)

Oh yeah, about this 7200.10 noise that other thread complaining about, dunno whether they got lemon one, but mine are running quite & cool even on heavy syntetic load for hours, even my DVD burner is hotter. The HD noise are totally masked off by the Intel stock cooler fan noise at 2500 rpm.

-

[greenmaji]

So this is just some upgraded code for the Intel southbridges.. Sounds like I might be going 965 or 975 then; 945P is the chipset on the value conroe boards

[Randyman...]

Interesting! I always thought Software RAID was inferior to running RAID on the Southbridge controller itself (if supported)? Looks like the only major drawback is the ~15% CPU useage with RAID-0 being accessed. Not a small hit, but your access times seem to be identical to a single drive setup (that is really cool!).

I believe the "Write Back Cache" artificially inflates the Bursts scores - but that is still very impressive indeed!

I'll probably stick with the ICH7R "Hardware" RAID-0 for now - but you have given me the urge to tinker!

[greenmaji]

@bing.. your first HD tach is only displaying the first 86GB or so of your array, any way you could do a screenshot of the full array?

[Randyman...]

Originally Posted by greenmaji

@bing.. your first HD tach is only displaying the first 86GB or so of your array, any way you could do a screenshot of the full array?

I think that IS the "Full Array". The 2 HD's are freely configured in the Intel Matrix Software. The front part of the HD's are set up as a "Partition" running in RAID-0. The second "Partition" is the RAID-1 array.

I might be 100% wrong - but that is how I understand it. RAID-0 AND RAID-1 on the same 2 HD's simultaneously! Another "WOW" for Intel Matrix RAID

Bing - Have you noticed any performance loss from the 15% CPU Useage?

[greenmaji]

Originally Posted by Randyman...

I think that IS the "Full Array". The 2 HD's are freely configured in the Intel Matrix Software. The front part of the HD's are set up as a "Partition" running in RAID-0. The second "Partition" is the RAID-1 array.

I might be 100% wrong - but that is how I understand it. RAID-0 AND RAID-1 on the same 2 HD's simultaneously! Another "WOW" for Intel Matrix RAID

AHHHH I think your right other then the CPU usage for the Raid0 (heck those scores in the raid0 almost make the CPU usage worth it)
I wonder what the average write is?

[Randyman...]

And is this more prone to Data Corruption versus using the Southbridge "Hardware" RAID? (I'd assume so - especially with Write Back Caching engaged, and I could see issues while running CPU Intinsive apps while trying to access the RAID-0 array).

Since I use 4 of my 5 PC's as Digital Audio Workstations (DAW's), I'd probaby prefer Hardware IMO (CPU power = Plug-In Power)... I still want to try it!!!

[Douken]

wtf...so nForce 5 users are wacked not to mention nForce 4 &ATi &...

RAID 0 & RAID 1 IN THE SAME SETUP!!! NO WAY!!

[bing]

Originally Posted by greenmaji...

@bing.. your first HD tach is only displaying the first 86GB or so of your array, any way you could do a screenshot of the full array?

No, I'm afraid it is not possible now since I've been through all the pains finding the sweet spot and now the drives are populated.

But if you observe my RAID 1 performance, it should be easy to predict that the sequential/linear speed will be degraded starting from the middle of the disk area approx. > 100GB to the end of the drive. Also the seek time will be badly hurt since the head needs to move & span across the disk if I make the whole drives RAID 0.

With my scenario, those 80 GB (actually 40 GB at each drive) is the only narrow spot/area of the disk region that will boost the avg. seek time as seen in the benchmark.

C'mon, you have to admit it with this price ratio compare to Raptor drive, they're dirt cheap with the result of 9 ms sec seek time plus 1GB burst speed which is so "reasonable" especially on this "value" rig.

As I said before, my strategy is to use the beginning part (fastest region) of the disk for RAID 0 to boost my boot time and OS + Page File +Apps responsiveness which is proven with almost 10 sec boot time (bugged & infested XP installation, not fresh installed one).

Program launching speed for big dodo like Photoshop CS2 and bloatwares like MS Office or worst MS Desktop SQL Server YIKES !! are like never before, it is so darn fast.

While the slow part above > 50 GB region, I use it for RAID 1 to protect my important data and good news is these are rarely accessed like pics & video from my camera/handycam. Also lotz of ISOs & other stuffZ he..he...



-

[bing]

Originally Posted by Randyman...

I think that IS the "Full Array". The 2 HD's are freely configured in the Intel Matrix Software. The front part of the HD's are set up as a "Partition" running in RAID-0. The second "Partition" is the RAID-1 array. :

BULLS EYES ! Yep, you're correct !

Screen shot of my Disk Management

The C: system drive is on the speedy RAID 0 volume while the D: (data) drive is on RAID 1 volume :
PS: For other new comers that didn't follow this thread from the beginning, these are on two 250GB physical 7200.10 drives.


See, even tons of installed bloatwares and 2 GB page file is nothing. For me 80 GB is more than enuf for OS + Apps.

I might be 100% wrong - but that is how I understand it. RAID-0 AND RAID-1 on the same 2 HD's simultaneously! Another "WOW" for Intel Matrix RAID
Bing - Have you noticed any performance loss from the 15% CPU Useage?

Infact I didn't believe it my self at the 1st time, keep saying to myself, C'mon.. two raid volumes in two physical drives ? Whata BULL !, but after spent hours at Intel's web site in the matrix storage section reading all those materials, things suddenly change beyond my expectation.

Perfomance lost ? Remember that 15% are on "constant" full disk load and activities while the synthetic benchmark was running. Real life situation are barely noticeable for "bursty" 15% CPU load even on high load SQL query or heavy Photoshop CS2 in actions.

Well after what I've been through, have to admit that I believe what they're claiming at here -> Intel Matrix Performance Data


Man.. I'm starting to sound like Intel fan boy, uh..oh.. worst Intel Chipset fan boy ! LOL

-

[bing]

Updates ! ... and it is getting crazy, I mean the burst speed !

OK, the first benchmark result above (1st post) was done without the TuneXP tweaks and after I've done some changes using TuneXP as "nd4spdbh2" recommended, it is unbelievable !!! Surpassed 1GB/sec burst and lower CPU utilisation !!!

TuneXP tweaks which I applied are :

- Ultra fast booting (re-arrange boot files)
- Defrag boot files
- Optimize prefetch -> Enabled
- Accelerate DLL Unloading -> Enabled
- Speed-up Windows IRQ Handling -> Enabled

And here is what I got :

RAID 0 -> Burst 1GB/sec and lower CPU from 15% to 10% !




RAID 1 -> Burst was previously 300MB/sec, now it shows 969MB/sec !! 3 times faster !




Now things getting wilder, out of my curiosity I did mild OC from the standard speed 2.6GHz to 3.3GHz for my P4 D805


And here is the result :

RAID 0 .. enuf comments !




RAID 1 got 1355MB/sec burst too ! With similiar seq.read curve as before.


Another comparison with write enabled benchmark program 2.6 GHz vs 3.3 GHz side by side :

Default "Total Length = 4MB"




Make it "Total Length = 32MB"




Darn, if any one of you want me to benchmark using your favourite proggy, just ask , I'll try my best !

Any idea if other disk benchmark program that can sorta "validate" these result ? Like CPUZ does ? Since its starting to look "un-reallistic" !

-

[Mr. Roboto]

WOAH, this only confirms that i'll be using 2 of these in my next build. Thanks alot!

[Douken]

<shotguns himself>

[greenmaji]

PCmark04/PCmark05/PCmark06

Not really HD benching programs more full system benching but the results should be intresting

[bing]

Originally Posted by greenmaji

PCmark04/PCmark05/PCmark06

Not really HD benching programs more full system benching but the results should be intresting

Heck yeah, I doubt bout it myself since it is getting "surreal" from this spooky "value" rig !

Thanks ! Downloading PCMark®05 Basic Edition (Build 1.1.0) , geez...its big ! 75MB !

Will post the result once I run it at different clock speed ! OC-ing HD ? ....never head that before.. LOL



-

[greenmaji]

05 results are hit hard by good HD scores.. Im thinking with the rest of your system being "value" it should be easier to see what's boosting the score (your HD subsystem )
It should help with comparing OC'd CPU results as well I think.

[G2145]

i will be running pc mark 05 as well when i get home...these drives are phenomenal