ATTO scores w/ RAID0 are not good...

hayesb2hayesb2
edited March 2004 in Hardware
I have 2 120GB Seagate SATA drives in a RAID0 running on an onboard Promise Fasttrack Controller. These scores seem high at first but then get really low...Anyone else agree? Any thoughts on what might be setup wrong?

Comments

  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2004
    Are you sure its raid-0 and not raid-1? Your top end scores are about what a single fast ide/sata drive would score. Which would be like most cheap controllers would show for raid-1. If its really raid-0 I would take it out of being in raid as your seeing no speed advantage beyond a single disks speed and you have greatly increased chances for data loss. What make of motherboard is this btw...

    Tex
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited March 2004
    You have the latest drivers and BIOS for the RAID chip?
  • hayesb2hayesb2
    edited March 2004
    Its RAID0. Granted this is my first time setting up RAID, but I followed the procedures when I installed windows. (create array, F6, etc..)
    Is there anyway to verify within Windows how the RAID array is setup (0,1,etc) and what the cluster/stripe size is?
    I need to get this figured out...
    Thanks.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2004
    If the total space is twice the size of a single drive then its raid-0.

    Stripe should be in the bios. Is this the sorry fasttrack "lite" controller in most motherboard bios's that doesnt allow you to even pick a stripe size by any chance? Hope not. They cripple that thing so as to not interfere with their sales of raid controller cards (unlike any other manufacturer) I mean a cheap motherboard with a built in promise raid controller costs about what they ask for a promise raid controller card seperate ... See where they didn't like the competition? Neither SI or HPT do this sorriness.

    Cluster size defaults to 4k with ntfs so unless you formated after the install and choose another cluster size you got 4k.

    If its the sorry lite version you might consider picking up a real raid controller on ebay for 25 to 35 bucks.

    Tex
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2004
    Here is an ebay link to buy a real s150 Promise sata raid controller for 40 bucks with no bidding

    http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2796626853&category=39968

    tex
  • hayesb2hayesb2
    edited March 2004
    This is a MSI K8T-NEO Board with an AMD64 3200+ CPU.
    I downloaded and installed the Promise Array Management and confirmed that it is RAID0. The Block size is 128KB (I chose the default performance option, however it did allow you to manually choose the block size)
    Even though it has a higher block size the ATTO scores should be higher right?
    The Array size is 240GB (2x120 Seagate Sata's) and it is just one large partition...
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2004
    A "good" stripe and cluster would be 16 or 32k MAX for teh stripe and 8 to 16k on the cluster size.

    I have setup a few hundred ide raid systems and they general start sort of suxing a** after you get above 32k or so on a stripe.

    You got a 4k cluster so it writes one 4k cluster at a time see..... And you have to write 128k in a stripe to the first drive before it even write to the second.

    You want it to write a 16k cluster that happens to match the 16k stripe so it writes one 16k whack to the first drive and then one 16k whack to the second and back and forth. See how much more efficent it that just sounds ??? rather then whcking out a ton of 4k writes till the first stripe is filled and then starting on the second one?

    tex
  • GobblesGobbles Ventura California
    edited March 2004
    just something to check..

    In windows manager go in to disk management and make sure that windows has not made your disks dynamic.

    Ive seen this happen sometimes and dynamic disks will hose performance, you may not have a choice in the situation.

    We set up a external scsi raid silo, (3 drives in an external enclosure) and windows made it all dynamic and would not let us change it back with out hosing the raid.

    And back up any important data before doing anything.

    Good luck.

    Gobbles
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2004
    And in XP unless your using one of only a select few high scsi disk controllers that ignore the newly implemented "write_thru_flag" then a dynamic disk is far and away faster for scsi stuff.

    Tex
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