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hard drives & raid - benchmark and compare!


Angry_Games

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Ok now I know that SoundX98 has some instructions in this thread about changing the size of the Stripe and the cluster. I have tried and tried to understand it but just can't get it to work. I follow Soundx98's instructions and go to disk management and can't find any options to change anything. If someone out there could explain this to me in laymans language I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much

 

Right click on the drive in question and click format, there should be a drop-down menu in the box displayed--this is where you can set the cluster size.

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Right click on the drive in question and click format, there should be a drop-down menu in the box displayed--this is where you can set the cluster size.

 

The maximum cluster size with that method is only 4k... If you instead right click the "My Computer" icon and select Manage and go to Disk Management then right click the drive and select format - you can use up to 64k cluster size. FYI You can't do this to your boot drive or the drive that has your swap file on it!

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Ok now I know that SoundX98 has some instructions in this thread about changing the size of the Stripe and the cluster. I have tried and tried to understand it but just can't get it to work. I follow Soundx98's instructions and go to disk management and can't find any options to change anything. If someone out there could explain this to me in laymans language I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much

 

And to change the size of the stripe, you have to go back into the F10/RAID controller utility (when your PC first boots) and reformat the array.

 

That's why I nixed a 4x80GB drive array. 320GB is way too much space solely optimized for a boot array. 16K stripe/4K cluster is optimal for those small OS files, but not for a lot of large game/audio/movie files. Maybe some day they'll find a way to set different sized stripes across partitions... ?

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Thanks for the info. unfortunately when I right click on the drive the option for format is not able to be selected. It is there but available. Any info on why that is. Is it because it is one large partition?

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You can't do it becasue it's the drive with your OS on it (correct?). Someone else pointed this out a couple posts above...

Only way to change it, once the OS is installed would be to run a program like Partition Magic, or to install an OS onto a seperate drive, boot into it, then change the origianl one, while it is not loaded up.

From the testing I've done, 16 stripe, 4 cluster is your best bet anyway.

And regardless of what your change your cluster to, the OS makes the page file 4k cluster, and many times this area is what's being accessed the most. It's been proven that 4-1 ratio for stripe-cluster is the best bet, and since the OS makes the page file 4, then this would be another reason just to make it all 16-4.

 

As far as people saying that for larger files should use larger stripe/cluster, well I think this is yet to be proven. Theoretically, I can see how it COULD be true. And I have read this from many experts over the years. But, I really haven't seen any real proof. When you run these benchmarks, you don't know what area of the disk it's testing, so it may be testing an area with large files, or it may be testing an area with small files, or it very well may be testing an area that is blank (no files), or a combination of any of these, so how can anyone really say?

Someone needs to completely fill up a raid array on seperate drive(s) from the OS, with nothing but large files, and then fill up another with nothing but small files, and use various stripe/cluster combos, and report results from a couple different benchmarks. Alot of work, but could be valuable to many people.

I play alot of games, that use large files, so I'm interested. I ran many tests, using different stripe/clusters on a fresh OS install each time, but like I said, I don't know what area of the disk the test is running. I'd be willing to sacrifice a few seconds on the OS load (which is many small files), to gain a few seconds on game loads (which is a few large files), if any of this is true.

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so do you think it would really be worth it for me to reformat and put it in at 16k instead of the 64k I have now? Or should I set up some different drives and do it the way (if I can) you mentioned with partition magic?

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Using a 4-1 (stripe-cluster) ratio is probably the most important, and finding which set to use (64-16, 32-8, or 16-4) is probably secondary.

Whether or not it's true you should use larger stripe-cluster for large files, I think the difference here would be very very small, but using the 4-1 ratio is much more important. There are plenty of results here (and around the net) to show this.

If you haven't installed much, I suggest doing 16-4, even more so if this is the drive your OS is on, since it has many small files, and many of us has already done enough tests to prove this is the best combo for the OS. Also the fact that the OS uses a 4k cluster in the page file regardless, and the page file gets used alot.

Also, for most testing here, we used NTFS. I have not done alot of testing for FAT32, but the little I did do, showed that a 2-1 ratio, rather than 4-1, was the best (for me). And FAT32 was slightly faster.

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Guest geronimo

Always slower to the end. You can compare it with a cd. It takes much longer for the cd to spin 1 time at the edge of the cd than near the center because the distance is longer. Same wit harddrives.

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and why the wall here? hasn't even reached the 1.5gb/s limit. not even close.

 

1.5gb/s is the speed of the interface, not the drive itself. In other words, IF the drive could put out 1500mb/s, then the interface won't limit it. As usual, when they talk about 1.5gb/s or ATA150, etc, it's all pretty much a marketing thing. These drives have been performing about the same for a good number of years. All they've changed is the speed of the interface, which is pretty much useless until the drive can actually perform better. My ata133 7,200rpm drives perform the same as my sata150 10,000rpm drives do, which is only slightly better than my really old ata66 5,500rpm drive.

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nah, these are the Seagate 7200.9's with the 3gb/s interface and NCQ. single platter 160gb drives. my mobo just doesn't support it:D nvidia decided not to include it in my NF4X chipset. i'm happy for now if these are doing max for the supported interface. when i move to AM2 i should see much more improvement then. guess i'm satisfied for now with my first raid array.

 

got a little scared when i botched the boot sector somehow trying to ghost the drive with norton 2003 to a DVD. don't want to even try again since i got crazy nervous when it thought i lost my data on the other partitions.

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