Im trying to set up my drives in a R0 array.
2x320gb sata drives.
I set it up in the bios then I made a winxp cd with the raid drivers on and started installing. I pressed f6 and then later it says oi I dunno wot these drives are, have you got a disk? I was like no, thinking the drivers were on the disk and would be installed later. They was (as far as I can tell - VIAMRAID or something).
So it was happy but then on the formatting page it came up as ~600gb. Is it seeing the disks as a JBOD? I was expecting it to show as ~30-0gb.
edit: I think Im being stupid.
Your trying to create an Array with 2 hard disks using onboard Raid.
Then you need your motherboard Raid Drivers, on a floppy disk for when windows asks for them, or it will not see them as 1 logical disk.
It will see them as 2 seperate disks or none at all depending on the chipset.
RAID 0 is Striped so you will get ~600GB
Im thinking you wanted RAID 1 which is mirrored.
Edit: P.S. Ive said it once and Ill say it again - RAID 0 on a home workstation is a stupid idea :)
Cornet is right, RAID 0 is striped, RAID 1 would mirror disk A to B and give you circa 300Gb.
IMO RAID 0 is fine on a home workstation providing you are aware of the higher failure risk and make appropriate backups often, or store important data on another drive (or mirrored RAID).
I was being dozy, yeah I wanted RAID 0 rather than 1, my brain is a bit pickled atm. I used nlite to slip the raid drivers on an XP disk.. which mostly worked.
I got a 200gb Maxtor drive as a file backup and a 80gb WD drive for important backups of backups so I think im ok. Touch wood.
87mb/s drive index with Sandra - I think thats in the right ballpark so it seems to be cool.
Ive got a 4 drive 250GB Hitachi RAID 0 setup. Using HDTach I was getting in the region of 170mb/s on the outer parts of the disks and 120mb/s on the inner parts.
Setup the "drive" with 64k blocks and 16k stripe size, so every block is evenly split across the 4 drives.
Its great for loading games, BF2 maps load in no time :D
Quote from: WalrusbonzoIve got a 4 drive 250GB Hitachi RAID 0 setup. Using HDTach I was getting in the region of 170mb/s on the outer parts of the disks and 120mb/s on the inner parts.
Setup the "drive" with 64k blocks and 16k stripe size, so every block is evenly split across the 4 drives.
Im struggling to believe those figures, are they cached/uncached ?
My RAID1 setup gives me around 80MB/s raw read speed and 300 MB/s cached..
RAID 1 will generally be faster for reads than RAID 0 since most RAID 1 algorithms will all reading in parallel from different disks :)
My hdtach burst speed seems really low for the setup. Ive used the hitachi utility to check theyre running in SATAII mode and I dunno what else to check :/
(http://www.palmer934.plus.com/hdtach.jpg)
(http://www.knighty1.com/hd1457.JPG)
thats what I get with 5 x 80gig drives running sata2 in raid 0
but low for me too I think ?
going to reinstall with xp64bit soon, will re do it then and see if it makes any difference ?
EDIT. p.s. cornet, I edited this post when I realised I was looking at the wrong numbers and talking balls!
The 8MB reading will be so high because its getting it from cache.
You need to know how it is getting the benchmarks. In general the larger the amount of data it tests with then the more accurate the results will be.
For small amounts of data then it could be cached in the hard disk cache or in RAM