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Thread ID: 32377 2003-04-16 23:10:00 Cheap Raid Card ? SKT174 (1319) Press F1
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136355 2003-04-16 23:10:00 I was quite disappointed when I found that my RAID 0 (striping two 80GB HDD) has no performance gain over my other PC with a single HDD .

They both averaged out at 35xxx KB/s at sequential read .

I then deleted the RAID 0 and just use as 2 single HDD with the same controller, the average read was 48xxx KB/s and highest was 62xxx . . .

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thot Raid 0 suppose to have better performace than a single HDD? It should split the file into half and read/writes to both hdd simultaneously . So, in theory if a PC with a single hdd that takes 20 seconds to write a 1GB file, a PC with RAID 0 would take 10 seconds since it's writing to both HDD with 500MB data each .

Of course, that's theory, in real world application, you won't see that performance gain, which I can understand . But the results I get is not even on par with a single HDD . .

Can someone with more experience please tell me am I doing something wrong? Is it because the RAID card was cheap . . the chipset on the RAID card is Silicon Image . .
SKT174 (1319)
136356 2003-04-16 23:27:00 I'm just curious... how did you work out how fast the HDDs were transfering data? somebody (208)
136357 2003-04-16 23:35:00 HD Tach 2.61 was used and PCmark 2002 was used also ... SKT174 (1319)
136358 2003-04-17 06:47:00 it depends on a few things.

1 how the benchmarking was done.

2 stripe size used.

3 bios/firmware and harddrive compatability.

you need to set the stipe size according to what you will be useing the system for. controllers can vary in speed depending on what stripe size is used.

some hardrivers are not designed for raid setups (seagates??). also check there are not upgraded firmware/bios for your setup.

finally the biggest drawback is the OS and applacitions. general applacations can even be slower with raid than without. (storagereveiw.com has a good article on that).
tweak'e (174)
136359 2003-04-17 08:22:00 I wouldn't worry about the sequential read speed. How do your seek times compare? A faster seek time will give a much snappier feel to your computer than a high sequential read/write. You will only need a high sequential read/write on the occasions where you are copying huge files around (ie when you copy a large DivX or something). BIFF (1)
136360 2003-04-17 11:05:00 the whole point of raid0 is to get higher transfer speeds. seek times won't change much as it has more to do with drivers RPM, size of plater (ie the distance the head must move to get the data).

have a look at this (www6.tomshardware.com) and browse here (http://www.storagereview.com/)
tweak'e (174)
136361 2003-04-17 22:40:00 Thanks for the info tweak'e :) very useful website SKT174 (1319)
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