Raid Vista question

[foxmobouser]

I'm planning on setting up a RAID0, I've read that with XP you need some disk with drivers in order to do that. I'm going to be installing Vista ultimate will I need a extra disk for that or will Vista be able to do that without the extra disk?

Thx

[Raptorfury]

it should pick it up , but just in case have a usb flash drive with the raid drivers on it . nice thing bout vista is that no more floppy ... yay ............


oh btw i plum forgot you can use the cdrom as well . make sure you have the Mainboard disc on hand in case . if it doesnt you can browse the cd for the drivers ..

[FunkZ]

Yup, USB drive or motherboard driver CD. But with a 680i you should be okay, nVidia came out with new RAID drivers for the 7 series chipsets and Vista doesn't have them preloaded.

[foxmobouser]

Thx, setup was a breeze.

Now that I'm done can i turn off the bios Raid option so I dont get the extra raid utility in my post when booting? Dont want to mess up the setup.

[FunkZ]

No, if you disable the onboard RAID you won't be able to boot to your stripe array. The RAID0 will still exist between the 2 drives, but it won't recognize it without that enabled. It has to detect the array at every boot.

[pokute]

How are you liking raid? I'm gona pick up another wd640gb drive and I was wondering if it's worth it for my gaming rig?

[FunkZ]

IMO every computer should use at least a 2-drive RAID0 array for the OS. You will be blown away by how much faster the computer is. The trade off is you're at twice the risk of a drive failing and losing everything. Which is why I put important data on a different drive.

[Goliath182]

Heres my RAID 0 setup. All of it is in RAID 0, ive never had any issues with it even though its supposed to be unreliable. Smokes pretty much anything ive ever seen on this forum. O and i havent defraged my HDD in over 6 months. :ahhhhh:

http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii202/goliath_182/untitled-6.jpg
http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii202/goliath_182/untitled2.jpg

[Goliath182]

I found my test when these HDD's were pretty new.

http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii202/goliath_182/Hdtune_2.jpg
http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii202/goliath_182/Hdtune.jpg

[FunkZ]

That's a weird looking result on your 20Gig partition on that array. I'm surprised those four 15k SAS drives didn't score better. Do you have read caching disabled?

[Goliath182]

Im not sure ill have to check that. It might be because my controller asks for a battery and i dont even see a spot to put one.

[FunkZ]

The lack of a battery on the RAID controller shouldn't affect performance, unless write caching is disabled because of it. Usually it just warns you that data loss can occur if it loses power while waiting to write data to the drives. Most onboard RAID solutions don't have battery-backed cache either.

[Goliath182]

I cant remember the exact thing it says but its something along the lines of write through disabled? or enabled and something else disabled ill have to check that later.

[foxmobouser]

How are you liking raid? I'm gona pick up another wd640gb drive and I was wondering if it's worth it for my gaming rig?

Theres no way to describe it other than awesome. My windows score went from 5.6 to 5.9. The speed is great, everything loads faster.

I did a Raid 0 stripped with 65k option. So yea its worth it, Id do it earlier but I was too lazy to backup my games and stuff.

[Raptorfury]

what is the best setting for a raid 0 on the cache size ? i been using the 128k mode .

[foxmobouser]

Hmm, had a nice article with benches on the performance of dif strip sizes in various apps but for the love of god I cants seem to find it now.

In summary the best strip size depends on what you use your pc for. If you are moving large files, doing video editing and such then you want a 128 if you use your pc to do office work and type emails, write papers and such then you want the 16k option. Everything else between those numbers is a mix of what you use your pc for.

So if you use 128 and you work with apps that store small amounts of data then you will have a "green pea" in a big box and waste alot of space.

If you use 16k and big files it will break them up into many smaller ones thus slowing you down.

So the best performance in my opinion is at the 64k and 32k lvl.

In my bios the "Optimal" setting was the 64k so I just went with that.

[FunkZ]

I've done my own tests using different size stripe blocks, and it also depends on the number of drives you're using. 64k is a good all-around block size to use and seems to perform the best when using a two-drive array. When I switched to three drives the 32k block size got better results. 16k is great for four or more drives.

[Raptorfury]

thx when the time comes for me to redo windows i will redo the arry and use a smaller striping cache . i mostly play games on it once in a while i will decompress a large file but its not every day and constantly .

[Miker]

If you are overclocking a 128KB stripe is best (Intel Raid), less then that are you are going stress everything more moving data around.