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Win 7 Software Raid 0 - Slowdown, Help/suggestions needed

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ph33rgear

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 21, 2010
Messages
80
Hi,

So I've always enjoyed making gameplay videos etc, Well recently I just went out and bought two WD Caviar Black 500GB hd's to run in Raid 0 strictly for recording.

The problem that I'm having is this. After I first installed the HD's I ran a CrystalDiskMark bench on the new v:/ drive I created using Win7 and it was giving me 144/MBps write speed.

Excellent right, I can record HD gameplay footage no problem. Well after a few days (changing no settings) I can only get 80/MBps in DXTory (recordning software with built in test/bench) and 100/MBps max now in CrystalDiskMark.

The software solution for the raid 0 should not really be an issue, as I have had it run in other computers for a while with no problems, speed was not a factor in those cases though so I really never tested them, http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=429 this guy had good results as well.

Anyways I was wondering if anyone had some tips/tricks or something I am overlooking at the moment to help me out.

The funny thing is, when I start the bench's , it starts @ 140-160/MBps then after a second settles at a lower speed and stays there.

Any input would be appreciated.
 
If I were to hazzard a guess, the high start then drop in speed would be the ram buffer on the HD filling up then being forced to wait as data was dumped out to the platters.
 
Limahl said:
If I were to hazzard a guess, the high start then drop in speed would be the ram buffer on the HD filling up then being forced to wait as data was dumped out to the platters.
Click to expand...

Great observation and point, which I did think of BUT... the thing that threw me off a bit was that when I had first installed them and set the raid array up.. I ran the bench and had got 140ish/MBps each time.

So why didn't that happen then, if this is the case, I dunno.

That's why I can't figure it out. I've recorded roughly 200GB of video with it and that is all the drive(s) have been used so far.

Thanks for the reply and if anyone else has any ideas please chime in, it's all appreciated.
 
The more you use of the array the CDM benchmark will go down since it the place where it will create its space to write files will be further inside the disk. As for the absolute performance even the outer track benchmark is bad. RAID 0 should have a STR of nearly 2 times the STR of a single disk.
 
drescherjm said:
The more you use of the array the CDM benchmark will go down since it the place where it will create its space to write files will be further inside the disk. As for the absolute performance even the outer track benchmark is bad. RAID 0 should have a STR of nearly 2 times the STR of a single disk.
Click to expand...

Ok, yeah I guess that is makes sense of course, the further out it has to write on the platter the slower it is.

It's just a single drive, I'm getting 70-80MBps and they are 1TB drives half full. So it seemed odd to me that they(raid) had dropped to that speed.

I guess I just can't dwell on the benchmarks and work on optimizing my recording settings.

I have 5 HD's in that pc so I was testing on all of them.
 
uunut said:
See this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-6.html
Click to expand...

EXCELLENT diagram, thanks!

See, That's what i'd thought I should do. Is buy 2TB caviars and then only count on using 500GB from each to stay on the inside of the platters. So essentially I would have 1 GB for recording then transfer them to a storage drive.

Thing is a got a great deal on the 500GB drives annnnd I might as well just buy a SSD for the price of the 2TB Caviars haha, not to mention wasteful too lol.

I just like to tinker around what can I say.

Another thing to note though, that it's talking about one single drive's speed, so essentially my Raid 0 should still be faster then i'm currently getting.
 
Those 500GB drives are slow, you don't need to go black to have better speed, any 2TB green drive will give you more than 110MB/s easily.

As for short stroking, you don't need a separate storage drive, you can use the rest of the same drives. Some will even have a RAID0 of the quicker parts of the drive, then a RAID1 of the rest.
 
Aesma said:
Those 500GB drives are slow, you don't need to go black to have better speed, any 2TB green drive will give you more than 110MB/s easily.

As for short stroking, you don't need a separate storage drive, you can use the rest of the same drives. Some will even have a RAID0 of the quicker parts of the drive, then a RAID1 of the rest.
Click to expand...

Interesting.

I really only grabbed these ones as I got them for 58$ CDN each.

How come they are slow?
 
I don't know, maybe they're old models with low density platters ?
 
I tried to see on the WDC page if they would confirm whether they were using 250GB or 500GB platters for this drive however I could not find that in the specifications.
 
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