Windows Dynamic disk RAID 0 Strip Size?

[bhvm]

Hello Gurus,

 

I have set up RAID 0 on my laptop via Windows Dynamic Disk.

 

The hard disks are 2X Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM, 8MB buffer ones.

 

Everything is great... and system is lightning fast!

However, I cannot remember what strip size i've set during the setup.

Is there a way to confirm the stripe size? I won't dare erase the data and go over again.

 

Also... This strip size seems to be causing lot of waste... My 8.0GB folders Shot up to 9.5GB in 'Size on disk" notification.

[Nemo]

Striped Volumes

Striped volumes improve disk I/O performance by distributing I/O requests across multiple disks. Striped volumes are composed of stripes of data of equal size written across each disk in the volume. They are created from equally sized, unallocated areas on two or more physical disks. In Windows XP Professional, the size of each stripe is 64 kilobytes (KB).

 

Striped volumes cannot be extended and do not offer fault tolerance. If one of the disks containing a striped volume fails, the entire volume fails, and all data on the striped volume becomes inaccessible.

Source: Windows XP Professional Resource Kit - Disk Management

 

Striped Volumes

Striped volumes improve input/output (I/O) performance by distributing I/O requests across two or more disks. Striped volumes are composed of stripes of data of equal size written across each disk in the volume. They are created from equally sized, unallocated areas on two or more disks. For Windows Server 2003, the size of each stripe is 64 kilobytes (KB).

Source: How Dynamic Disks and Volumes Work

 

The same is true for Windows Server 2008 "The Windows volume manager stripe unit is fixed at 64 KB. "

 

I couldn't find any ready references for Windows 7, but I am going to assume it's also fixed at 64KB.

[bhvm]

Thanks for finding that nemo!

 

What DO i remember is, I gave some Manual Strip size During creation of stripped partition...

It was 4k or 32k something like that.

 

Any utility that can tell me what I've set? I don't think its 64k

[bhvm]

Ok,

 

So I painfully Formatted the array, and created a new one with 512 setting.

It Works!

 

I used to loose about 2GB per 10GB... now its very efficient! Very fast!

 

Thread maybe Closed please

[Waco]

Smaller stripe sizes also reduce throughput (the only benefit of RAID 0). Keep that in mind.

[bhvm]

Great...

 

I was giving 120 MB/s on Bigger clusters,

Now its 118 MB/s....... I think I can live with lesser 2MB/s...

 

 

Thanks for your interest.

Have a nice day.