Extremely poor RAID0 performance :-(

[bomax]

Just built a new system. Put in dual 36GB Raptors SATA. RAID0 config on my Neo2 K8N Platinum. In SiSoft Sandra, I'm only seeing 70MB/s! Also on HDtach, the graph is very spikey, fluctuating violently from ~110MB/S down to 40MB/S.

I left the stripe size default, which if I recall correctly was 32KB, but possibly 64KB.

 

[jpeyton]

Another victim of the Raptor myth.

Anand's Own Words:

"But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0. If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0..."

 

[bomax]

I had actually read the article prior to purchasing my system. I was aware of the limited advantages to RAID. However. The other scores in the SiSoft HD benchmark give a RAID 2xRapter36 a score of 95. That is a full 25MB/s more than my setup. This is what I am comparing to: other people with same setup as me having much (25%) higher scores.

 

[stevty2889]

Sisoft isn't a good hard drive benchmark, so I wouldn't pay any attention to it. As for HDtach, I get the same type of graph you are getting, but I am still quite happy with my raptors, athough if I had it to do again, I probably would have gone with something else, as they don't really make enough of a differance to be worth the money.

HDtach avg read speed 71.4mb/s
burst speed 180.7mb/s
graph jumping all over the place

 

[w00t]

man that suxs i am glad i read that article along time ago you just baught a 170 dollar hd for nothing

 

[MellowMan]

I know how you feel, I set Up Raid-0 on my computer, and I too was disapointed, it's a waist of time.

 

[Ketchup]

First of all, there aren't many benchmarks that can accurately tell you how fast RAID is. Sandra writes one long file to the hard drive and reads it back and that is going to give you a number much higher than a real world difference between it and a single drive. I think RAID feels faster myself, depending on what the stripe size is set to. If I recall, raptors perform best with a very small stripe size.

So, do the Raptors feel slow, or are you playing bencharks instead of games and getting all worried?

 

[uOpt]

Uh, works very well for me.

Did you guys try software RAID? Maybe the implementation of that hardware RAID is just junk.

I got 132 MB/sec reading and writing out of 3 vanilla Maxtor 160s using software RAID-0. With nothing but the onboard controller on the Intel board in my sig.

 

[bomax]

So, do the Raptors feel slow, or are you playing bencharks instead of games and getting all worried?[/quote]

<_< I am not a gamer. But app loading time, along with general speed of things was not what I felt it should be. So I took out the benchmarks.

I found another guy who has the same setup as me and was also getting 70MB/s at first with the spikey graph. He changed his stripe size to 16KB and also adjusting the drivers he used when first loading windows, as well as moved the array to SATA ports 3&amp;4, and now he says it feels MUCH faster. He gets 100MB/s and the graph is silky smooth.

I plan to do that once I get some free time. That is where performance should be for this setup.

 

[aka1nas]

I second trying software RAID. I was running a adaptec 1200A RAID card for RAID 0 and it ended up being significantly faster to get a promise ATA controller and do the RAID in software. I get HDtach scores in the 80s now with a pair of 160GB maxtors. With hardware RAID on the adaptec controller it was about 45MB/sec