What Cluster Size and Stripe Size for a RAID 0 Setup on my P-6860FX?

Im planning to go with a RAID 0 Setup on my P-6860FX, however, I was wondering, what is the fastest setup for the Cluster Size and Stripe Size?

 

depends what you're going to be using it for

 

Well, im replacing my crappy 5400 300+GB HDD to two 7200 RPM Momentus 320GB HDDs.

Im most likely going to use it for games and multimedia. Any ideas?

 

everything works great over here with Jakamos recommended setting of 4kb cluster and 16kb stripe size.

@jak---when you gonna tell us how to change the cluster size through vista?

 

I use 64kb, I primely game with it

 

Ahh, darn it. I just installed vista on a 128kb stripe size

So... I have to wait until the installation is done, then redo it

 

Not worth the hassle. The difference in performance will be too small. You're better off spending the time tweaking your OS instead.

 

strip size is not that important, its true, just tweak your settings with a fresh install.

 

yeah, and I use 128kb anyway for multimedia and gaming, and personally find it to be the best, you'll be fine

be sure to enable write-back cache

when you format a drive, there's a drop down selection called "allocation unit size" which is what vista calls cluster size. It will let you choose from 512bytes all the way up to 64kb. You can check it out without formatting to see what I mean:

Right click one of your drives in "Computer" and go to Format. You'll see allocation unit size right htere in the drop down.

It should be there when you're doing the recovery CD based format as well.

 

*facepalm* doh....i guess i should have realized thats what you were talking about.

 

I think stripe size matters more than people think in a raid 0 setup. I reinstalled windows Xp 4 times.

1. 128k stripe
2. 16k stripe
3. 64k stripe
4. 16k stripe

always 4k cluster size

Everything worked about the same, except Guild Wars(mmo). In any major town, the whole game would get "jerky" when it was loading all the character models.

On 128k the game got almost unplayable because anytime you turned the fps would drop to 3-4.

On 64k it was a lot faster, but still dropped to about 15-20 fps in towns.

On 16k it worked about as well as a non raid setup drive. My fps was only dropping to about 50 fps when traveling through populated areas.

On the other hand. 128k/64k does make the drive read/write a little faster than the 16k setup, but to me it wasn't worth the problems I run into if a game needs to access the hard drive on a continuous basis.


edit: Make sure to enable "Volume Write-Back Cache"

Start->Programs->Intel Matrix Storage Manager->Advanced View->RightClick Volume0(somewhere in the drop tabs)->Enable Write-Back Cache

 

Alrighty, so here's what happening so far for me.

I installed the 2 new HDD's and they are working brilliantly!
Currently using RAID 0 setup with 16kb stripe size. Im going to give 64kb stripe a go.

As for the previous 320GB HDD that I had on the laptop, I installed that on the PS3

And for the PS3.... I don't know. I am probably going to buy an external HDD 2.5" enclosure and put the 60GB one on it.

 

There is no way this would have been down to stripe size. I would bet my cuddly toy on it. I think it is coincidence and something else was going on. Especially your last statement "On 16k it worked about as well as a non raid setup drive" - all stripe sizes should perform better than a single drive.

 

LoL OH NO! Not the cuddly bloody rabbit toy!

 

Rabbit? Woolly mammoth more like

 

I've tried to see if something else was the problem, that's why I went from 16k back up to 64k to see if maybe it was just an installation error, but the problem came back again.

I may have phrased that quote. On 16k a 1GB file will load onto the ram much faster than any non raid setup, but the problem I was having makes it seem that loading 50-100 5MB files might slow it a bit down. I don't quite know exactly how Guild Wars loads character models onto the ram except that it does it after the map has loaded.

 

In general a larger stripe size should correlate with increased performance for larger files. So if you're talking about gaming, 128kb should work better than 16kb, and likewise 16kb should work better with smaller files such as OS files, but of course everyone's computer is different.