RAID 0 "Best stripe size?"

I have a Gateway P-6831FX running RAID 0. What is the best all-around stripe size for gaming? Right now I'm running 128k. Should I lower it to 64k or even 32k? Let me and others know!

Thanks!

 

I am not sure that the stripe size makes much of a difference. I set mine at 64kb, and I think its working pretty good.
The one thing you should know, is that the larger the size of the stripe, the larger the file size.
Say you have a 24kb word doucment, and the strip size is 1mb. Well the drive can only write in 1mb intervals, so that 24kb file takes up 1mb of space on the drive. Basically even a 1 byte file will be written to the disk as a 1mb file.

I know harddrives are faster with bigger files, so increasing the stripe size should increase performance, but it will decrease total useable harddrive space.

I have not physcially tested the speed difference, so hopefully someone else can chime in on that part.

K-TRON

 

you're kinda treading water in uncharted territory here.

Simply this: RAID on a laptop is new, and mostly unheard of until recently. The RAID experts scoff at it and even desktop users who have used it and not used it wonder why bother....

In the end, the GAINS from Raid on a laptop, are so slim and almost negligible in the real world (what we save a few seconds off transfer of files or loading game levels or opening huge PSD's or WAV's or AVI's?) that it really probably ONLY COMES DOWN to how much hard drive space you have the luxury to take up. The speed issue is micro-seconds on average size files for access speed and times, and overall on huge files just fractions or even a few seconds sooner than later.

In the end, it's a marketing gimmick that seems to have been paying off- people want to even put RAID on their "dual hard drives" simply because the big laptops can HAVE two hard drives... not understanding what RAID is, how it really works, what is behind the technology, or WHY it was introduced to begin with --and why use it or why not. And what kind of hardware it requires and how and why or why not manufacturers haven't all bought into this gimmick for notebooks and made it standard on 17"+ sized machines (I mean really, in consumer format it's just a tiny chip with some wiring, right? *chuckle*)...

The server forums for deep tech stuff might be a better place to get the answers you're looking for. I've done enough with RAID over the years, with top gear and consumer gear, to realize it's all risk and no gains with your Data in consumer applications and situations. Even a mirror array is better off being ghosted most of the time onto a second drive vs. mirrored in real-time!

RAID-0 on a notebook???

Why bother?

All risks and no gains except in a few instances, and still all the risks of data loss, no matter what you do or who makes your gear or how good and cool it is.

I bring it up, even though it's not helpful, simply because if you compare two of the EXACT SAME MODELS of the SAME NOTEBOOK and one with the RAID disabled in the bios and it's simply using the HD's as two separate HD's, and the other one with RAID-0, and you're sitting there with a stopwatch, every time you access the drive all day long, the double-non-RAID user will wait maybe 10 minutes more in a whole day than the RAID person, at best.



In a more serious work environment, only a few people in the world will utilize the RAID-0 in a notebook in a way that makes sense, outside of geek-creds and bragging rights (*mine has RAID-0!* Yeah! ).... and they'll only utilize their RAID-0 systems as a backup to their desktop rigs. Like me. Whopp. But I've disabled it now as it's just not a good idea in any and every case usually. No gains, all the penalties, all the risk, all the heat and failures....date problems...

Simply it's all risk and no gains in a notebook. A marketing gimmick that has been working, starting with the gaming community. Hey I know- I've done more than my share of it! Even with editing and 3d modeling and video and wave file work though, really, I noticed nothing in the end, but that first drive failure will have you on your knees no longer wondering why server people have multiple file servers- like sometimes 10 or more, all running the exact same things with a WALL of the most expensive hard drives, over and over again to try and protect their data... at 10x the cost. Things have no improved in this field, really- these techs still spend half their careers trying to protect the data-!!!

In a mirror array, which is slower than a normal drive on it's own by a tiny fraction, the best size is determined by the average file sizes you have on your disk that you need to have stored on the disks.

If you're just a gamer, like most of the people buying and using RAID notebooks, the cluster size is truly irrelevant -it's theoretical. Windows isn't crafty enough to utilize anything except opening big files, so it's a matter of that hard drive space- but you can afford to waste HD space, so no harm done. And in the end we're talking about a few megabytes, or maybe a few gigabytes on a full drive- or you're using the wrong kind of RAID in the wrong kind of situation. In which case you've bought into the hype.

So size it how you like- it really is irrelevant in the long term. If you can afford the data risk and the machines that can DO Raid-0 in a notebook, you can afford the space wasting or upgrading to a terrabyte or so without flinching. Small is usual for consumer applications, so under 256k is good. 128 is what I'd recommend, unless you've got more than 80 large files that you will be USING REGULAR to edit and work on, in which case 128 or even up to 512 cluster size is better.

You won't notice a speed hit in the real world, regardless of what you're using, outside of the RAID-0 speedier access times in seconds on huge files and 2-3 seconds off level loading times in some games.... and you can get that simply by switching to a more robust and better put together OS like Ubuntu 8.

 

I don't believe that the speed increase using raid is 'slim' as you say. I will comment however that many laptops that may even support 2 hard drives are unlikely to support hardware raid. If this is the case than software raid is the only viable option, and software raid is not on the same level as hardware raid. So perhaps i am of the opinion that if your laptop supports hardware raid then do it, if not then software raid may be somewhat pointless. Can anyone provide any benchmarks testing hardware vs. software raid?

 

Hardware raid is much more efficient than software raid because the few laptops on the market which support hardware raid, the only two: D900T and D900K. Both have the VIA hyperion K8T hardware raid controller. The new D900C and D901C systems from Clevo have an Intel Software based Raid controller, which is one of the reasons why I did not opt to get the d901c. A system which has a hardware based raid controller has a separate chipset processor which tells the data which way to go, and will does all of the processing for the data. On a software based raid system, the main cpu has to do the work that you want and it has to do what the hardware raid chipset does via software. The problem with this is, software cannot just make hardware appear. Software raid is bottlenecked a great deal, because it is putting much more strain on the chipset.
In a hardware raid configuration, I am able to get an average of 200.7Mb/sec on my dual 7k200 array in my U709 laptop. This is not possible on a laptop which has software raid because of the additional bottlenecks from the processor, and chipset.

K-TRON

 

voodoos are too expensive for what they are imo, so i guess clevo's the way to go

 

My experience (firsthand): with software RAID and hard drives: the higher the random access time the higher the stripe size (I find 128 works best for 2 desktop drives). For SSDs I noticed a 40% allround improvement from reducing stripe size all the way down to 8... So in certain cases it might be worth doing some benchmarks yourself.

And yes, you trade reliability for speed... But I like speed!