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    D900F RAID 0 set-up 500GB 7200RPM HDDs help

    Discussion in 'Sager and Clevo' started by AndrewKW, Aug 27, 2009.

  1. AndrewKW

    AndrewKW Notebook Consultant

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    Hello guys,

    I would like to set up my Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200RPM drives in RAID 0 array.

    Here are my questions:

    1: What is best stripping cluster size (or whatever is it called) 16KB, 32KB, 64KB or 128KB ? What is difference between those? I want maximum performance.

    2: Is it better or faster to use three drives in RAID 0 compared to two drives performance?

    3: Is it going to be significant performance increase in real world apps?


    Thank you very much
     
    AndrewKW, Aug 27, 2009
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  2. twEEker

    twEEker Notebook Enthusiast

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    1. 64KB for a balance, it works well since you will be having the OS/Apps/Games/Etc on the 1TB array.
    2. Three drives = Faster read/write speeds but slightly slower access time. I'd stick with two in a laptop but it won't hurt putting in a third.
    3. Depends on the apps you use and how hard drive heavy they are. I would say you will notice it in the majority but not enough where it is like night & day, that is SSD territory.
     
    twEEker, Aug 27, 2009
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  3. AndrewKW

    AndrewKW Notebook Consultant

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    Thank you very much.

    My friend told me to use 32Kb and I gotta ask you what is difference between
    128Kb and 16Kb. Are there performance ore stability issues? I need to get it :)

    I will have to ask some of D9F owners in RAID 0 about their performance and seek times with 2 / 3 HDDs.

    Thank you in advance
     
    AndrewKW, Aug 27, 2009
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  4. twEEker

    twEEker Notebook Enthusiast

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    Two hard drives, raid 0, 64KB stripe size, writing a 256KB file. In order Disk 1 (64KB) Disk 2 (64KB) Disk 1 (64KB) Disk 2 (64KB) is how it would perform back and fourth to improve performance over one hard drive.

    32KB/64KB would be a solid balance if you plan on using what I described above OS/Apps/Games. If all you had was an OS on there I'd say 32KB or less due to lots of small files.

    D900F users will report the same results as D901C users for the most part. With two of my hdd's in my specs I get around 145-155 MB/s reads and 12-13ms access times with a 64KB stripe size, give or take. If I added in a third hard drive the reads would be higher along with access times. I don't remember the writes.

    Just remember it's not a wise idea to store important data on a Raid 0 array, if one hard drive dies you lose everything. You never stated what you intend to do so I'm just explaining some basics of it. You need to try it out but you can't go wrong with 32/64.
     
    twEEker, Aug 27, 2009
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