Raid Matrix not working as expected

Hi,
Ive got two seagate 320gb 7200 drives, Ive seen people on the forums get great results with a raid matrix using these drives. Ive got an asus motherboard with intel 945g chipset, using the built in hardware raid, I created the first RAID0 array as 80GB for my OS, programs and games, and the second RAID0 array with the rest of the drives for data storage. I was expecting to see some pretty high burst speeds, but I only get around 330, If I remember correctly I got higher when I was using a single big RAID0 array using the same drives.

Any thoughts?

Burst speed really isn't important in RW applications but to get the wild burst speeds you have to enable write back cacheing in the matrix raid console application.

Also try tuneXP http://www.download.com/TuneXP/3000-2086_4-10290928.html
And turning off indexing on the drives (uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" in the drives properties in windows)

It also seems like you made your stripe size small for Intel chipsets(NV chipsets perform a little better with small stripe size), If you ever re-build the array try 128KB stripe size.

borrowed from one of bings post in the matrix raid sticky.

Yea do what green said those results are in par from what i get with my 2 320's in raid 0 as well.


May i ask why you made them both raid 0 its not a very good idea to have storage drive at raid 0 because if one drive fails then you lose all your data. I change that to raid 1. Less to worry about

wow thanks, I am using a 128k stripe size.



Thats when i enabled the write back cache, I'm using windows vista, so not sure if tune xp will work. Also, I thought indexing was a good thing, especially with vista, what effect on performance would it have if I turned it off?

Making my data drive a RAID1 array would be wiser I know, but i like having the 500GB of space, plus Ive yet to have a seagate fail on me, a little naive maybe
Im used to having one large drive, the partitions really for performance and to help reinstall windows.

1st of all, Wellcome to OcF or should I say wellcome to Storage Section !

Average transfer from 141MB/s to 157MB/s is not bad after enabling the WB cache isn't it ? Try run in Long Bench instead of Short and also HDTune or ATTO256K will give us a glance how's your drive's performance.

The unique signature is the significant increased in CPU which is the typical when this Intel Raid run on non C2D cpu, I can see you're using 945G/ICH7R mobo. I was using the same chipset as well in the last time before migrated to 965/ICH8R, mind share the other details liek CPU, RAM, VISTA version etc ?

yousefmohseni said:

Thats when i enabled the write back cache, I'm using windows vista, so not sure if tune xp will work. Also, I thought indexing was a good thing, especially with vista, what effect on performance would it have if I turned it off?

Click to expand...

Well, if you're really want to try it, then you will be the 1st on Vista and please share it with us !

yousefmohseni said:

Im used to having one large drive, the partitions really for performance and to help reinstall windows.

Click to expand...

My experience and thru observation on others, partitioning "sometimes" could hurt the performance, again mark the word "sometimes" since it depends on the user's usage.

But on your concern on windows "re-installation" is valid and its PITA, then I believe you might be interested to read this particular post in the matrix sticky.

I hope it will change your perception on the Matrix Raid 0 + 1 configuration instead of plain Raid 0, just watch closely the screen shot of my drive images collection which reside in the raid 1 volume ! Talking about re-installing or restoring the OS+Apps in my rig ? No big deal !

My 2 cents.

Thanks

Heres my PC spec:
CPU: Pentium D 930 - 3.0GHZ
MOBO: Asus P5LD2-VM DH - 945G chipset
RAM: 2 x 1GB OCZ DDR2 6400 800MHZ - 4-5-4-15
GFX: Radeon X1900XT 512MB
SOUND: XFI extreme music
HDD: RAID Matrix 2 x Seagate 320Gb
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate

and here are some benchmarks. The increase in CPU usage doesnt reoccur, it was just in that one test.

HDTACH Quick bench indexing enabled



HDTACH Long bench indexing enabled



HDTUNE indexing enabled




HDTACH Quick bench indexing disabled



HDTACH Long bench indexing disabled



HDTUNE indexing disabled



I dont see much difference with indexing turned off, will probably turn it back on unless suggested otherwise. Current results are more what I was expecting

I think I will make my second array RAID1, makes more sense, but I need the space at the moment for some work im doing.

disabling indexing speeds file loading times.. its something you will observe more then bench, try loading a rather slow loading application and see if it speeds up the load time disabled.
Indexing is suppose to be good for finding files faster with searches.. I don't really need it personaly, I know were my files are.

good point, youre right Battlefield 2 loads much faster now, and I know where all my files are too so ill keep it off.

yousefmohseni said:

Battlefield 2 loads much faster now

Click to expand...

Exellent

Any file loading time comparisons would be

Just do PCMark benchmark, post it at the Futuremark ORB and do compare there, you will be surprise that your "HD related" score might beat alot of other C2D rig but with crappy disk there. Its Green to blame since he told me this on how to compare !

Def going to enable write back cache soon as I get home!! CANT WAIT!!!!!

Here are some results from PCMARK05, gave an error on the last test and said the results werent valid when I tried to submit them, these were the only results i could see and it didnt give my PC a score. Think it could be to do with Vista. Might do some more tests tomorrow, have to get some sleep now though

How would you suggest I test file loading times?

File loading times review linked
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=445800

stopwatch mostly

Cache not enabled


Cache enabled


I kinda like my non cached latency and averages better than cache


How do you keep the maintained reads? I only get that with raid 1... is it ur smaller platter size?

You would want the Raid0 as the first array and have it be smaller (the size you would need for your OS and Apps) in volume.