raid-0 stripe size?

[Pla]

I just got 2 ibm 120GB 8MB cache drives and I am going to make a raid-0 array with onboard HighPoint chip on kd7-raid.

What stripe size do you recommend for gaming, video editing and system performance?

 

[PsYcO CyBrArIaN]

CHeck THIS place out. Itll answer any questions you have.

In regards to my preference or recommendation, I have none, I just find the info in 2.5ms.

 

[CrazyP]

I left everything at default 64K for my 2 120 GB drives. to me it works pretty good.

gave me sandra scores of 58246 kB/s

 

[Sonny]

What type of work do you expect to do with the array? If it were only for a speed boost in a regular desktop system the 16K - 32K stripe should be more than enough but you will see an increase in CPU usage. If you like to work on uncompressed *.AVI files then use a 128K - 256K stripe.

 

[Pla]

I just build my array.
I used compromize for the stripe size - 64KB.
(the options were from 16KB up to 1MB).

It works great!
The disks alone gave me sandra bench of 30MB/s.
The raid-0 gave 50MB/s.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Pla]

Also, if you think about it...
smaller files (64kb) will be read about 64/30000 =... 2ms which is less then the latency time of 8.5ms
so the total time will be 2 + 8.5 = 10.5 ms
now if it is striped (when stripe size is small) then you have 64/50000 = ... 1+8.5 = 9.5
So for single read of small files it is not noticable.
For multiple reads bigger stripe is always better.
For bigger files bigger stripe is also better.

It seam smaller stripe is better for slower disks - 64/5000 = 13ms + 8.5 = 21.5 vs 64/10000 = 6.5ms + 8.5 = 15ms

So there is sweet spot depending on the disks speed.

All this is whenthe usage of the raid array is not well defined - like my pc (not a server, not a video edit only, not a lame desktop only...)

Anyway... just my thoughts...