P-ATA Raid 0 Stripe - 96MB/s!!! Yeah, baby!

[MichaelD]

I finally have my disk subsystem where I want it to be. After a couple weeks of waiting, I got my two WD-SE 120GB drives.

I'm running NTFS. I striped them (64kb block size) on a 3Ware 7000-2 ATA Raid controller. Running W2KSP3.

I tested the system partition, which is a 40GB partition I created on the 237GB (after partitioning/formatting) array. Damn, this thing flies in the benchmarks!!!!! Can't wait to get some big@ss games loaded up so I can test it "real world." Thanks to those that steered me towards the 3Ware; it cooks! All I have is ATTO. I don't have the full version of HDTach, so I can't use that proggy. ATTO is pretty well accepted, though. Sweet!


ATTO benchmark

 

[DaFinn]

Nice... :beer:

 

[mechBgon]

Did you set the array as a Dynamic Disk? You might get even more out of it If you didn't, just pop into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Manager, and right-click Disk 1 or whatever your array is being called, then Upgrade To Dynamic Disk. It'll ask which disk(s) you want Dynamic-ized, and do a reboot. Upon reboot it will say it's finished detecting new devices and then you reboot once more.

 

[mechBgon]

Actually, now that I look at the STR of the 120JB's, it might already be hitting its full throughput... 2 x 49Mb/sec max is 98Mb/sec and you're hitting 96 already. Anyway, have fun with your setup and post your impressions of the real-world speed; that's what matters in the end, right?

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks guys. I have already upgraded to Dynamic Disk. Chizow tipped me off to that a few weeks ago. The difference is dramatic; no benchmarks from pre-dynamic, but seat of the pants is very noticeable.

This certainly beats the daylights out a single WDSE drive at about 46mbps and way faster than two Maxtor DM60 drives (I think that's the model #) on an onboard-Highpoint 372 controller at 78mbps.

I'm so stoked~!! Tomrorrow, we game.

 

[vaporize]

i am new at this but are you saying that having 2 hard drives in raid 0 will double your bandwidth or transfer rates?

i am going to build a new computer, can you guys tell me what hard drive set up will be the fastest for gaming? should i go with 1 hard drive or 2 hard drives? thanks

 

[bgeh]

usually, transfer rates are doubled, but access times go up by a little due to latency

 

[Lord Evermore]

What causes dynamic disks to make it perform better? I can't imagine there's that much lag just due to the type of partitioning, plus the system partition can't be made dynamic.

Of course, 96MBps and nowhere to send any data that fast nor any way to get it outside your computer. I'd be happy with 70+.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: vaporize
i am new at this but are you saying that having 2 hard drives in raid 0 will double your bandwidth or transfer rates?

i am going to build a new computer, can you guys tell me what hard drive set up will be the fastest for gaming? should i go with 1 hard drive or 2 hard drives? thanks

Hello there,

How familiar are you w/system building? Installing Windows on a RAID0 stripe is not difficult, but there are few more twists and turns to deal with.

A single Maxtor or Western Digital drive with an 8-mb cache would be plenty fast...I'm just impatient and "need" the extra speed.

LORDEVERMORE,
I haven't the slightest idea why enabling "dynamic disk" aids performance. Chizow tipped me off to this in an email he sent me. I didn't benchmark the array prior to enabling dynamic disk (I enabled it right after installing SP3) but the box does seem a bit speedier, particularly going from BIOS to desktop.

 

[LED]

I take it the Dynamic Disk feature only comes with 2K OS? and MichaelD
are you using FAT32 or can NFTS be had in that cluster?...Nice Benchy as they are just short of my WD Raptors with the SI onboard RAID....and HERE are my WD's set-up the same as you with FAT32 on the onBoard HighPoint 374 RAID chipset

 

[RyanVM]

What's this Dynamic Disk feature and how have I never heard of it? What does it do exactly besides speed things up? Any tradeoffs/risks to be aware of?

 

[HaVoC]

<sorry for the double post, folks>

 

[HaVoC]

MichaelD, for such a hardcore power user (and a "Lifer," nonetheless) I would correct my subject if I were you. When I first read this thread title I thought "96 megabits per second? Barely faster than actual Fast Ethernet throughput! Ridiculous." That should be 96 MB/s. Lower-case "b" is generally accepted to mean bits and upper-case "B" means bytes. I know, nitpicking but it leads to much confusion on the Internet these days.

Anyhow, your STR (seq. transfer rate) is very impressive, but actually RAID-0 will do very little to improve your application or game load times. It will usually be a wash because of the faster STR negated by overhead and latency associated with RAID. RAID-0 is great for STR sensitive apps such as uncompressed or HDTV video capture or multi-track audio I/O. Seek time and I/O per sec are more important in getting those huge applications to load faster.

Most of my information about hard disk I/O comes from http://www.storagereview.com I consider that site to be THE authority on storage. Keep in mind that ATTO is not reguarded very well there as an accurate benchmark program. Intel's IOMeter is their preferred high-level application. Try running SR's IOMeter configuration benchies and see what you get.

 

[MichaelD]

Heh, corrected my title...every once in awhile, I still get the nomenclature (MB/s vs. mbps) confused.

I also added in that I'm running NTFS on the array.

LED Man, those Raptors, are FAST! 100MB/s from a single drive? Yowza!:Q I can only imagine what you could do w/two of them striped. Saturate the PCI bus, that's for sure. The onboard HPT controllers are pretty decent; I own three mobos with them (a 370 and two 372's) and have found them to be a pleasure to work with. I got the hardware card b/c someday I might want to run a Mirror and that's when the true hardware card shines vs. onboard software...apparently, in a stripe, it doesn't make much difference at all. 3MB/s is negligible when you're already over 90MB/s.

AFA the overhead goes, it's too early for me to tell. They just fly...I'm happy.

Not starting a debate, b/c I'm not as bright on the EE aspects of it, but I can say w/assuredness that my game load times are considerably faster with this stripe vs. a single drive. Even back when I had older Maxtor 2mb drives on the onboard Highpoint controller they were faster. It works for me.

 

[LED]

MichaelD...The Raptors are Striped in RAID0 although I haven't fine tuned them yet...that's why the WD's you and I have are not to shabby

 

[sharkeeper]

Try running IO meter and/or IPEAK suite on your arrays for the real scoop fellas!

-DAK-

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: LED
MichaelD...The Raptors are Striped in RAID0 although I haven't fine tuned them yet...that's why the WD's you and I have are not to shabby

Ahhh, OK! I was like "All that from one drive? WOOOOW!" I obviously need education on the Serial ATA drives.

How do you fine tune the array? Stripe size?

Shuttleteam; is IO Meter freeware? Where can I get it? I'd love to run all the benchmarks I can.

I finally got a game loaded yesterday; IGI-2. The first level took 9 seconds to load w/a single WDSE drive (80GB). With the two 120GBs striped, it was 4 seconds flat. Good enough for me! That's exactly what I wanted. Worth every penny.

 

[sharkeeper]

Shuttleteam; is IO Meter freeware? Where can I get it? I'd love to run all the benchmarks I can.

I finally got a game loaded yesterday; IGI-2. The first level took 9 seconds to load w/a single WDSE drive (80GB). With the two 120GBs striped, it was 4 seconds flat. Good enough for me! That's exactly what I wanted. Worth every penny.

It should be. IPEAK is discontinued and was not freeware but a trial that runs five times is/was available. Between those two, you can see what any logical disk will do under just about any conditions.

ATTO is like measuring your engine's RPM. IOmeter is like getting in the car and going around the track...

If your game loads are cut in half, it sounds like it's working for you! That is the purpose of striping, right? More performance, more risk. That's always worth the gamble... (looks at Mylex ExtremeRAID3000 FC and sixteen 15k drives :evil: )

-DAK-

 

[Harabecw]

why risk?

 

[chizow]

MichaelD, glad the 3ware is working out for ya! Definitely a cut above the software controllers I tried out prior to the 7000-2. Anyways, I'm not sure exactly why Dynamic disks improve performance so much myself; it was a tip from 3ware tech support (awesome btw) after my initial concerns about the poor write speeds of the card in XP. The sluggish write speeds weren't just apparent in ATTO or other benchmarks, but I could tell performance was considerably worse when installing XP and large programs. I didn't do much research on why or how, but I think its because the 3ware's onboard hardware co-processor causes the card to function more like a SCSI card than a softRAID card that relies on the CPU/OS. Something about allowing more simultaneous accesses I believe........

I wouldn't put much stock in StorageReview's conclusions on RAID 0 and gaming. As I've pointed out in previous posts on the topic, I find their write-up to be based on flawed logic (their conclusion is basically that RAID 0 is not worth 2x the price + controller for less than 2x performance across the board) and their gaming test suite is clearly antiquated, a poor indication of current gaming requirements and performance. I've seen significant improvements in game loads in BF1942 and PlanetSide. Other games show less improvement, but its still very noticeable in games like NWN and WC3. As games continue with the trend of larger textures and huge maps (not coincidentally, games that can use 1GB of RAM), I think you'll see a greater demand for faster disk subsystems. RAID 0 is clearly the cheapest and fastest way to obtain that improvement.

Chiz

 

[Tavoc]

I would expect that game loads would see dramatic benefits from RAID 0 since they deal with alot of sequential information. Actual IO performance during a game would be only marginally better during a game due to RAID 0. The thing is though, that if you have enough ram, you arent going to be accessing the HD much at all while you are playing.

 

[MichaelD]

Hi Chizow!

You were definitely on the money about the 7000-2. Awesome card. Install was cake; copied the NT/W2K/XP folder off the CD onto a floppy, loaded it at Windows startup...cake. Card detected correctly by Windows. I am using PCI slot #3. I have no other PCI cards loaded, FWIW. (additional info for whomever else may read this...happy to help. )

I want to bench using IOMeter, just for giggles; to see how my array stacks up to other folks'.

I am using the drivers that came with the card, 7.53, IIRC. I know the driver has to match the firmware. 3Ware has the 7.56 drivers AND firware posted on their site; but I'm not going to muck with it...not yet anyway. :evil:

Shuttleteam

That's always worth the gamble... (looks at Mylex ExtremeRAID3000 FC and sixteen 15k drives)

:Q Got cash? :Q That would probably BREAK IOmeter or ATTO! MWuahahahahahaha! Pics?

 

[Lonyo]

Someone said there are twists and turns in installing Windows on a RAID array.

Would it be possible to stick in a HDD on IDE1 master, then 2 more in RAID 0 on a card, and use the master drive for Windows and the RAID-ed drives for other stuff? (second HDD)

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
Someone said there are twists and turns in installing Windows on a RAID array.

Would it be possible to stick in a HDD on IDE1 master, then 2 more in RAID 0 on a card, and use the master drive for Windows and the RAID-ed drives for other stuff? (second HDD)

Hi there.

That was me that said the "twists and turns" thing. Most of them doing a clean install of the OS on a bootable RAID array; you've got to load the drivers at the very beginning of the OS install, or the OS won't be able to see the drives/array attached to the card.

In answer to your question:

Would it be possible to stick in a HDD on IDE1 master, then 2 more in RAID 0 on a card, and use the master drive for Windows and the RAID-ed drives for other stuff? (second HDD)

The answer is YES, MOST DEFINITELY! Many people do this, particularly those that do video editing. They boot off a single drive, then do their "work" off the RAID array, which is much faster than a single drive.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Bah, I'd take a cheetah 15k over ide raid anyday