- Joined
- May 8, 2003
- Location
- BC
I recently purchased a new system and this time around, I decided to finally play around with RAID 0. After assembling the system and figuring out the build in RAID utility, I decided to setup my system in one array encompassing both hard drives entirely and went about installing my operating system and overclocking it.
The system (yes it's in my sig, but it may change eventually):
AMD Phenom II x3 720 Black Edition - OC'd to 3588 MHz (17.5x205 @ 1.475v)
Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P with F5a BIOS
G.Skill Pi 2 x 2GB PC-8500 DDR2
WD WD6401AALS 640GB x2
After running a couple benchmarks I was curious if I could get some better performance out of my array. Last night I decided to try setting up my hard drives in various configurations to see if there was a noticeable difference in performance.
I had been doing a lot of reading regarding "short-stroking" raid 0 setups in order to increase performance, but I wanted to see some numbers that would relate to my specific application. So four windows installs later, I had a bunch of benchmark data that I thought I would share!
Test 1
Here is a diagram showing the configuration for this test:
NOTE: Unused Space in this diagram is space assigned to another partition using the remaining space that is not formatted.
This was the configuration I did by default when I built the system. This being my first RAID array and not knowing any better, I made 1 big array out of 100% of each hard drive and proceeded to make a 40GB partition for Windows XP.
Here were some performance results from the benchmark tools HD Tune Pro 3.50 and HD Tach 3.0.4.0:
NOTE: Some tests were run multiple times for consistency. Where applicable, I have included links to the results of the subsequent tests.
HD Tune Benchmark
Test run 2
HD Tune Random Access
Test run 2
HD Tune File Benchmark
Test run 2
HD Tach Benchmark - Quick
Test run 2 - Long
Test run 3 - Long
Now, compared to what I had been using for windows in my old computer (40GB partition on a Seagate 320GB SATA I HDD), the numbers shown in the HD Tune benchmarks were about triple the throughput of what I had before, so regardless, this was a victory in my books.
Since some people have concerns about failing hard drives destroying their RAID arrays, I decided to see what the performance would have been like if I wasn't using RAID at all in Test 2.
The system (yes it's in my sig, but it may change eventually):
AMD Phenom II x3 720 Black Edition - OC'd to 3588 MHz (17.5x205 @ 1.475v)
Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P with F5a BIOS
G.Skill Pi 2 x 2GB PC-8500 DDR2
WD WD6401AALS 640GB x2
After running a couple benchmarks I was curious if I could get some better performance out of my array. Last night I decided to try setting up my hard drives in various configurations to see if there was a noticeable difference in performance.
I had been doing a lot of reading regarding "short-stroking" raid 0 setups in order to increase performance, but I wanted to see some numbers that would relate to my specific application. So four windows installs later, I had a bunch of benchmark data that I thought I would share!
Test 1
Here is a diagram showing the configuration for this test:
NOTE: Unused Space in this diagram is space assigned to another partition using the remaining space that is not formatted.
This was the configuration I did by default when I built the system. This being my first RAID array and not knowing any better, I made 1 big array out of 100% of each hard drive and proceeded to make a 40GB partition for Windows XP.
Here were some performance results from the benchmark tools HD Tune Pro 3.50 and HD Tach 3.0.4.0:
NOTE: Some tests were run multiple times for consistency. Where applicable, I have included links to the results of the subsequent tests.
HD Tune Benchmark
Test run 2
HD Tune Random Access
Test run 2
HD Tune File Benchmark
Test run 2
HD Tach Benchmark - Quick
Test run 2 - Long
Test run 3 - Long
Now, compared to what I had been using for windows in my old computer (40GB partition on a Seagate 320GB SATA I HDD), the numbers shown in the HD Tune benchmarks were about triple the throughput of what I had before, so regardless, this was a victory in my books.
Since some people have concerns about failing hard drives destroying their RAID arrays, I decided to see what the performance would have been like if I wasn't using RAID at all in Test 2.
Last edited: