Raid questions

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lodingi

2[H]4U
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Aug 24, 2003
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I am going to setup a Raid 0 system this weekend. This is my first try at raid and I have a couple of questions.

1. What stripe size should I use? Data is not a worry as I have an external drive for storage. My computer is for general use & gaming.

2. Do I use the Vista & Win 7 raid drivers or do I use third party drivers?

3. My HD's are WD 1 TB black caviars. I read some where I need to use the TLER utility. Is this accurate & where do I find it. I searched Google but no luck.

Thanks in advance.
 
Thanks for the link Adidas. Unfortunately it doesn't really answer my questions. The link is 2-3 years old and it's possibly outdated. I've read conflicting reports on question #3 which is what your link focuses on.
 
The answer to #3 is here.

I don't RAID, unless it's a cookie jar, so someone else will hafta help with the other questions.
 
which raid card are you using, if your using your motherboards, use the drivers they provide.
 
I have been testing extensively with a Gigayte X58-UD4P motherboard, strickly hard core data crunching, doing this from memory. I went into the BIOS, enabled RAID using the onboard ICH10R, rebooted. It prompted me for a CNTRL-I to go into the RAID configuation. I selected the drives I wanted, and how big to partition them etc, used the default 128K stripe, RAID0. I rebooted and in Win 7 went to the disk storage manager, right clicked on the volume, and initialized the drives. I don't need the boot option, used the other one. After the initialized, then format them as a simple volume. Look at the volume in device manager. Make sure write back is enabled, I think it was by default. I also tried the other option too, speed increased some. I did install the latest Intel and JMicron drivers after I had it all working in Win 7. I can't remember if I used VIsta drivers for both or if JMicron had WIn7. Speeds listed below are from the last line of the default screen on HD tach, I think it is something like 8192.0 or something, don't have the PC here and I'm running Linux now. I didn't do anything with TLER, didn't know anything about it.

On each volume I'm only using 200GB total off the combined 2TB available for scratch and work space.

With 2 1TB blacks I was getting about 235MB/s reads and 220MB/s write on the ICH10R.

On the Gigabyte (JMicron) controller I get about 160MB/s read and only 130MB/s write. :mad:

The 1TB blacks are slightly faster than standard 640GB AAKS drives, but not much. 4 x 640s will get 400MB/s read/write, so they are definately not slow. I need to find a decent cheap card to replace the onboard JMicron.
 
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Thanks again everyone. I figured out the Raid 0 setup. It was pretty easy. I haven't messed with the TLER as not much info is available.

While doing some reading, I stumbled upon Intel's Matrix Raid. Apparently you can setup a Raid 0 & Raid 1 on 2 physical drives. You put your o/s & data on the Raid 1 drive and your games, pagefile & scratch disks on the Raid 0 drive. Seems perfect. The only downside is I would have to format & start over. Does anyone have any experience with this setup?
 
Heres a few reads I came across for the Intel Matrix raid. There was a sticky I thought here about it but it may have just been a thread ???:confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Matrix_RAID and http://techreport.com/articles.x/8059/1
Seems to be a neat idea good luck, I was running 2 raid 0 arrays in a server, then went to WHS. The raid was MUCH faster than WHS's JBOD system, but meh, I gained about 600 gigs worth of old IDE drives I can use now and WHS has some nifty features too.
 
jay2472000 said:
Heres a few reads I came across for the Intel Matrix raid. There was a sticky I thought here about it but it may have just been a thread ???:confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Matrix_RAID and http://techreport.com/articles.x/8059/1
Seems to be a neat idea good luck, I was running 2 raid 0 arrays in a server, then went to WHS. The raid was MUCH faster than WHS's JBOD system, but meh, I gained about 600 gigs worth of old IDE drives I can use now and WHS has some nifty features too.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I will report back when I set it up. I need to figure out A) What size to make each Raid disk and B) what stripe size to use on the Raid 0 disk.

MrGuvernment said:
use intel ICHR Jmicron = the suck!
Click to expand...

Please elaborate. Thanks.
 
lodingi said:
Thanks again everyone. I figured out the Raid 0 setup. It was pretty easy. I haven't messed with the TLER as not much info is available.

While doing some reading, I stumbled upon Intel's Matrix Raid. Apparently you can setup a Raid 0 & Raid 1 on 2 physical drives. You put your o/s & data on the Raid 1 drive and your games, pagefile & scratch disks on the Raid 0 drive. Seems perfect. The only downside is I would have to format & start over. Does anyone have any experience with this setup?
Click to expand...


Lodingi, I am looking to raid 0 two wd640aals's and have not been able to find a decent guide to describe how to raid. Can you point me in the right direction? Also can you comment on the performance post raid? Thanks.
 
ruraljuror said:
Lodingi, I am looking to raid 0 two wd640aals's and have not been able to find a decent guide to describe how to raid. Can you point me in the right direction? Also can you comment on the performance post raid? Thanks.
Click to expand...

You can start here. It's easy to follow and includes pictures. Let me know if you get stuck.

The performance will be faster. I forget my benchmarks speeds at the moment. Definately faster. From what I've read, the more disks used, the faster the performance. Good luck.
 
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