View Full Version : Advice on RAID settings?

asifanwar
25th July 2002, 01:53
Hi,

I have just installed a RAID setup and would like some thoughts on the optimal 'stripe' size? Anyone out there have any expereince with this? I am obviously doing the same as you guys - ripping, encoding and IFOediting. I currently use FAT32. I had tried NTFS and frankly found no speed increase, but perhaps a bit more disk thrashing and inability to view the drive off my boot floppy, so went back to FAT32. Any ideas on that too?

Thanks,

Asif

Dual AMD AthlonXP 1600+
Tiger S2460 mobo with 1.04 BIOS
Crucial 512Mb Reg PC2100 DDR
Maxtor 40Gb ATA 133 7200rpm drive x 2 as a RAID0
Stripe size currently 16k (32k was slower I think)
PCI ATA133 RAID card (CMD 0680 chipset)
Pioneer A03 DVD-R (secondary master on mobo)
LiteOn 163 DVD-ROM (secondary slave on mobo)
Matrox dual head G550
WinXP Pro
theReal
30th July 2002, 21:08
The best stripe size also depends on your HD's cluster size. Good settings are usually when the stripe size is either 2x or 4x the cluster size of your HD.
I also use 16k stripe size for 4k cluster size. I haven't checked any other combinations because it works well. I read in different sources that these settings seem to be a middle ground for all tasks.
asifanwar
31st July 2002, 01:33
Hey! Thanks for replying!

I finally bit the bullet and did some SiSandra benchmarking on different stripe sizes, and I am posting the results below in case this helps. BTW, I did a test on Windows2000 with the 16K stripe size and it was IDENTICAL to WinXP so I assume others are too. I was led to believe that XP was slower with RAID but not so.

My system is as listed above. Here are the SiSandra scores at given srtipe sizes (all FAT32, default cluster size = 32K?)

2K 46679
4K 45948
8K 46940
16K 48732
32K 45701
64K 46261
512K 36693

So I finally decided to stick with 16K and be happy with it based on the objective numbers. I also decided to stick with XP cos it works just great and looks nice on my dual head LCD screens, and obviously was not crippling my machine.

Hope this helps someone out there. BTW, does anybody know if it would speed up if I used a mobo with 66MHz PCI slots instead of the TigerMP which has 33MHz slots?