How to Short Stroke for RAID

How to Short Stroke for RAID
by Joeteck

Mechanical hard drives are still the slowest part of our computers. While SSDs are becoming more popular, not many can afford them. Those who still like to pay about 10 cents per gigabyte will continue to buy mechanical-type hard drives. That said; let’s get right into the meat and potatoes of this article. All mechanical hard drives have a performance curve. The outer edge being the fastest and the inner edge being the slowest. When we run a program called HD tach, we can determine the fastest part of the drive. The drives performance ranges from around 130MB/s to around 60MB/s, depending on the drive. Short stroking is grabbing the fastest part of the drive and using it for booting only. HD tach lets us find the sweet spot, or the fastest part of the drive.

Click to expand...

Click here to continue reading.


Discuss this article below. If you are interested in contributing to the front page (www.overclockers.com), please feel free to contact me.


Thanks,
sno.lcn

Comments are now active on this article - Discussion below the article on overclockers.com will be displayed in the forums, and discussion in the forums will be displayed on overclockers.com.

Short Stroking with RAID

I am looking for some advise for my systems. I want to have some Redundancy in my HDD setup and performance, So I am thinking of using RAID 5. I want to Short Stroke 2 WD Black 1 TB HDD's and use this as the system drive. Then I planned on using another 2 1 TB drives for storage. I am not sure if I should setup a second RAID for the Storage portion or just leave the drives alone.

Also when short stroking the HDD's, would you do this before you install Windows? This is what I want to do but I am not sure from what I have been reading, no one says when you would implement the Short Stroke. Or do you install windows then install the program to short stroke the drives and then reinstall windows on the short stroked drives as a clean copy?

Then would you Short Stroke a 1TB to 300 GB or 100 GB? I was wanting to Short stroke them to 250 GB each but after reading this article, and the sweet spots seem to be at 100 and 300 GB I wasnt sure if I should just go with one of those.

I would appreciate any help and advise on this. Thank you

short stroke...

so basically you have to find the "sweet spot" with hd tach for a single drive...

then once thats obtained we put in raid 0...


i have another question though..

how do i know if i set raid to work at 8kb/16/32/64/128kb?

i have 4 drives that i'd like to use in raid 0.... but if 3 will yeild better preformance... then 3 it is...

currently i have 4 - wd re4 raid edition 500gb in raid 0....... and my hd tune graph looks like 2 mountans... hitting peaks of 333mb/s ... and lowest points at about 175mb/s///

my goal is over 300mbs which is reasonable ... ...

could you guys give any recommendations?

.... great description on short stroke btw!

thanks