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hard drives & raid - benchmark and compare!


Angry_Games

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hrmm...so far the 3x Hitachi does NOT show any real performance improvement over the 2x Hitachi on teh Si3114!!!

 

on the NV RAID it was very apparent that the more disks you threw at it, the better it performed...

 

doing the HD Tach bench now...

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im going to make a webpage for Angrygames.com detailing all this RAID crap when i am done testing all the sets ;)

 

it wont have overlays...but maybe i'll make it in a way that details the best results?

 

you like that little boot-up movie?

Yes the boot movie was very informative. Kinda hard to fake something like that. Not impossible but not worth the effort either.

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and now 4x Hitachi 80GB 8mb (3x Hitachi SATA II and 1x SATA I)

 

Si3114 RAID-0

64k stripe

9GB partition

 

4x_si3114_raid0-1.jpg

 

4x_si3114_raid0-2.jpg

 

4x_si3114_raid0-2b.jpg

 

now the only thing...when using the Si3114, it still shows on the F6 floppy driver the NVRAID and NV Storage driver...and both still say (Required) next to them...but i never install them (since i have zero NV SATA drives, only Si3114)

 

I've asked TW if these drivers need to be installed or not, and if they do, then I will discount all of my Si3114 tests and redo them with the two NV drivers also installed (don't see why this is necessary though since I have nothing plugged into the NV SATA ports at all, and only a single IDE CD-ROM).

 

 

ok, doing RAID-5 right now with 4x Hitachi disks!

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holy crap...i must be doing something wrong...RAID-5 = total slow dog for me (about 12-18MB/s throughput!!! 4x 80GB/8mb drives!!!

 

if this Long HD Tach bench ever finishes...I'll post up the pics then im done for the night

Wow, that throughput blows even for RAID-5. You will always get reduced throughtput with RAID-5 since it's breaking the data down and writing parity across the array. It sounds like the controller is getting bogged down with the overhead.

 

Try setting up the array with just three of the SATA II drives. This is the optimum configuration for RAID-5 since you want to keep the drive failure rate as low as possible.

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Looks like your earlier test was right on the money. RAID-5 sucks the life out of the throughput on these controllers. Not really surprising given the level of overhead required for striped parity.

 

Even a cheap LSI RAID controller has its own ASIC and RAM to handle RAID-5.

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ya if i remember correctly, the RAID-5 implentation is pure software, not hardware like it is on 0/1.

 

also note...there's a java GUI for RAID-5 software implementation. I installed this and the Sun Micro java package...and instantly BSOD about 10 seconds after hitting the desktop every time.

 

instead of trying to figure this out, i simply did the 3x drive RAID-5 and said forget it.

 

My personal feeling so far about this is if you need RAID-5, here's a few things that should be true:

 

1. you have a need for RAID-5, so must be important stuff...you don't want overclocking board for this sort of thing. You want server board and Intel P4 chipset/cpu (or Opteron)

 

2. you definitely would want hardware-based PCI/PCI-E RAID controller card. SATA/IDE/SCSI etc. RAID-5 is not for everyday use...its not for use that those of us that buy the Lanparty series of board would require.

 

3. drive performance is low, so you would more than likely want a high-end SCSI solution, as it would outperform the best SATA solution by a good amount. IDE is not even to be considered.

 

 

 

this is why i didn't bother to try to sort out the BSOD with the java GUI for RAID-5. If you truly have need of RAID-5 other than just 'trying it out since it came with the board and i paid enough for the board that i better mess with it at least once and get my money's worth', then you would have a hardware controlled PCI/PCI-E card..and better drives (SCSI).

 

so other than fooling around with it (since I never built a RAID-5 before, and not sure if I actually did it right because a lot of sites say its good performance which makes me wonder what they were smoking or if they had 24MB cache 15,000RPM SCSI drives on a UW360 SCSI controller in a 64-bit server PCI slot).

 

*ahem*

 

 

testing 2x80GB RAID-1 right now.

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now what???

 

Striping + Mirroring?

 

 

going to do the whole 'how to replace a dead disk in RAID-1' thing just in case anyone ever asks lol

 

then i guess i am done (except for making the webpage(s) that put all of this mumbo-jumbo in order...

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