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hard drives & raid - benchmark and compare!


Angry_Games

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@LanceDiamond

 

Since you double the drive failure rate when putting two drives into an array, you shouldn't have any data on the array that you can't afford to lose.

 

300GB for an OS is a bit much. lol

 

Hopefully someone will be the tester for the forum and post their results

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Thanks for the reply ExRoadie. :)

 

I am aware of the greatly increased chance of failure going RAID0 - if my backup strategy has to remain external drive to copy my data off, I'm ok with that. I currently use an external 250gb for backup and just copy my data occasionally.

 

I think I may go with two or three 250gb Hitachi drives in RAID0 - they're cheap, they're at least as fast as the 80gb drives from what I've read - and I'll have plenty of space for random junk I don't mind loosing. I'm probably going overboard on storage, but at $299 for 750gb, man storage is cheap now!!

 

One final question - after a lot of reading, it looks like the 3114 chip on the LanParty-DR board isn't really all that great performance-wise. Given that I seriously doubt I'll go over 4 drives total and if I do go over 4 drives, I'd want good performance out of the drives, is there any reason at all to get the DR version of the LanParty?

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If you don't need more than four SATA II ports you can save some bucks and get the D model.

 

The 3114 controller is only SATA and resides on the PCI bus not the PCIe bus like the nVidia chipset.

 

Thanks for the reply ExRoadie. :)

 

I am aware of the greatly increased chance of failure going RAID0 - if my backup strategy has to remain external drive to copy my data off, I'm ok with that. I currently use an external 250gb for backup and just copy my data occasionally.

 

I think I may go with two or three 250gb Hitachi drives in RAID0 - they're cheap, they're at least as fast as the 80gb drives from what I've read - and I'll have plenty of space for random junk I don't mind loosing. I'm probably going overboard on storage, but at $299 for 750gb, man storage is cheap now!!

 

One final question - after a lot of reading, it looks like the 3114 chip on the LanParty-DR board isn't really all that great performance-wise. Given that I seriously doubt I'll go over 4 drives total and if I do go over 4 drives, I'd want good performance out of the drives, is there any reason at all to get the DR version of the LanParty?

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I just got the best 2x WD1600JS ( most of the revioews shows that this is the best SATAII hdd in the market now)

 

i found them by luck here in Egypt and i was really amazed , although a dealer was selling them as they r 10,000RPM :sweat: and the others don't know anything about the HDD except that it is SATA no even SATAII

 

anyway i am using them in RAID0 now and just installed windows and the prg i need and made the long HD Tech test and see my results below

 

hdtech8so.jpg

 

 

 

honestly i haven't seen on this thread a score higher than mine even with 2x raptors in RAID0

 

i think this piece of art is the best now in the market

 

for the review check this link

 

EDIT: forgot to say that i am using NTFS on a 64k Stripe and WinXP default size on a 15GB drive

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hd_tach.JPG

 

2x 160gb Hitachi SATA2 raid0

 

I don't remember the stripe size on this (wish I did because I'm at a different speed now with a 16k stripe .. slower). I killed the raid0 that this was taken from to try a sofware raid in linux (the nvraid controller isn't supported, so I had to fakeraid which meant using the drives as JBOD).

 

Default (4k) clusters, NTFS

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WOW

it seems that SATA2 really give a boast in perfromance over SATA1

 

but ur score is much higher than mine while our hdd are nearly the same generation !!!

 

was the OS installed on this raid array while u were benching or not ?

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Fantastic results guys, very impressive results.

 

As I pointed out in post #5 of this thread, don't put a lot of faith in the HD Tach "burst speeds" as there are known issues with the RAID results as has been pointed out in their forums. http://www.simplisoftware.com/Forums/viewtopic.php?t=109

always make sure that Cool N Quiet is disabled as this can affect the benchmark results as well.

 

This is a brand new set of 2x74G WD Raptors in RAID 0 at 16 Stripe 4 Cluster with the drive seperated into a 30G partition and a 110G partition. The tests were run on the 30G partition that contains WinXP SP2 and benchmarking software only.

 

HDTach - Check out the Average Read and Access Times my bruthas :D

 

219Burst-HD-Tach.JPG

 

Here is the ATTO results - highest I have seen in the thread with 2 drives.

 

173557MBsecATTO.JPG

 

As Angry_Games has pointed out, it always best to bench after a defrag and re-boot.

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WOW

it seems that SATA2 really give a boast in perfromance over SATA1

 

but ur score is much higher than mine while our hdd are nearly the same generation !!!

 

was the OS installed on this raid array while u were benching or not ?

 

 

OS installed, winxp pro sp2

 

2 partitions, 20GB OS and the balance to an second partition. 712MB swap file located on a pata drive (one of the 80GB wd drives in my sig)

 

 

When I hdtach one of my WD 80GB drives (non raid) I get 49MB/sec average read. That is les than 1/2 the average speed for te Hitachis. Those are what I was using prior to this. I do notice a huge performance increase

 

After I posted last night, I went ahead and wiped everything, changed my stripe size to 64k, and reinstalled (same partition layout as mentioed above). From 1st boot from cd to first boot into windows took 17 minutes. HDtach scores before and after all the windows updates ended up being the same as what I posted before (the 16k stripe size was getting a max average read of 2MB/sec and the bursts would go below the SCSI Ultra320 reference score).

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