RAID Setup

[Igor 0]

If I want to setup IDE RAID 0, what is the best setting for clusters? 64, 128 or 256?

And what is the difference?

[Four and Twenty 0]

i would like to know this as well i have raid 0 right now with 64k clusters and it is working quite well but i am thinking about repartitioning my array when xp beta 2 comes out and i would like to know if one of the other cluster sizes gives better performance.

[Igor 0]

What is better, set one HD as Primary master and Second as Primary slave or

One as Primary master and second as Primary slave (RAID 0 setup)

 

From what I read it does makes a difference, but I can't remember the relation and I lost the link

 

How do you like you RAID setup? any problems? Hows the performance?

[5371 0]

Set both as master. That way both disks can be accessed through each of the ide-channels and at the same time.

[Igor 0]

Well.. Last weekind was spend rebuilding the rig... will see if the RAID0 can be

reliable in a long run.

 

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AMD Thunderbird 1000

MSI-TurboR

768 Pc133 Ram CAS3

1x30 7200 Maxtor

2x30 7200 Maxtor (IDE Raid0)

6x4x24 Creative Burner

5.1 Creative Live Value

5.1 DTS 35000 Creative Speakers

TNT2-Ultra Creative (time 2 go)

6x DVD Slot-Load

Alpha CPU Fan

19' Samsung 900FT

Microsoft Optical Mouse

Microsoft Natural Keyboard

[Four and Twenty 0]

I have mine set to raid 0 with both hard drives set to master. I have been using this setup for a while now and have had no problems with it. As 5731 said it is better to have them on separte ide channels. That is why all the drives in my system are on separate cables and why i bought an additional controller card for my storage drive even though i could have run it on the onbaord controller or on my original raid card.

I would still like to know if 64k blocks are the best or if larger blocks gives better performance. I imagine that there must be some performance diff as all the raid controllers that i have seen have this opption. I would test them all out and post benchmarks but that would take me for ever considering you have to reinstall everything to make this change.

 

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My System

Dell Demension XPS T500

Triple Boot

Windows 2000 Pro 2195

Windows Whistler Pro 2428

Windows Millennium Final Retail

PIII @ 500 Mhz (with after market heatsink and dual fan)

512 Megs Ram

Guillemot Maxi Gammer Cougar (TNT2 M64 w/ 32 Megs of RAM)

Matrox Millennium PCI (w/ 4 Megs of RAM for second monitor)

3Com Etherlink XL 10/100 Ethernet Card

2 x Abit Hot Rod Pro ATA-100 RAID Controlers

2 x 12.6 Gig Maxtor Hard Disks RAID 0 (for system)

1 76.3 Gig Maxtor Hard Disk (for storage)

40X LG CD Rom Drive

100 Mb Iomega Internal Zip Drive

MS Explorer Mouse

MS Natural Keyboard Pro

[Igor 0]

If I remeber correctly some site that compared RAIDs said that setting ya RAID clusters to 1/2 the size of you HD clusters provides the best performance. They recommended going with 64 or 128 depending on HD size

[Four and Twenty 0]

I primarily use NTFS with a 4096 byte allocation unit size. Is that the same as cluster size. If so would it make sense for me to use 4k clusters in my RAID 0 setup. I can't go lower than 4K and i can't go higher than 64K so i wonder what i should do. I have one FAT 32 partition aswell will that be affected the same way. Or will it even be a noticeable diff? I think I need to go do some research and find this sh1t out cause i want to be getting the best possible performance out of my hardware.

[Igor 0]

Here is something I dug up from www.voidyourwarranty.com :

 

Setting up a physical array is very easy, you simply select two hard drives, both on the same channel and set one as a boot drive and the other as the secondary. Set the stripe block, which should be larger than the cluster size (preferably two times the size of your average cluster size, aka 32k clusters = 64k stripe block prefferably), setup the physical partitions, format, and your good to go.