Interesting ATTO scores..

lemonlimelemonlime Canada Member
edited March 2005 in Hardware
I just installed my DFI LanParty UT NF3 250GB board, and got my file system all sorted out. I created a simple striped logical drive, with a 16K stripe size. Interestingly, all raid functionality is handled by the nf3 chipset, and not a SiI or other type of onboard controller. I ran a quick atto to make sure performance was acceptable, and to my surprise, there was a pretty large write speed increase. On my A7N8X-E deluxe on a fresh XP install, I peaked out at about 105MB/s on the writes and about the same on the reads. With this NF3 board, my writes gained about 20MB/s. Reads are about the same as they used to be. Interesting results. I'm not sure if anyone else noticed an increase in STR with the nf3 nvidia-raid? I ran the bench several times, and got similar results every time. Could these numbers be wrong at all?

Anyhow, a pleasant surprise none the less. Drives were 2xWD360 Raptors, and the NTFS cluster size is default 4096K.

Comments

  • madmatmadmat
    edited January 2005
    That's the reason I've been a fan of Intel's 8x5 ICH5R chipsets for so long, they move the SATA into the chipset and off the PCI bus so that the bandwidth is no longer dependent on the PCI bus which has other things going on depending upon what else you've got tied into it.

    I'd say that your numbers are probably correct and you're seeing the benefits of a more effiecient tie in strategy and possibly a better controller as well. Nice scores BTW. :thumbsup:
  • lemonlimelemonlime Canada Member
    edited January 2005
    I thought this was kind of interesting as well. It appears this controller also supports hot-swaping.. There is the option to stop and safely remove each SATA drive..

    Although in my situation, i find it a little funny.. I dont think my raid-0 would react very well on one drive.. dare me to click one? :D
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited January 2005
    lemonlime wrote:
    ...dare me to click one? :D
    I'd be curious to see what would happen, but not curious enough to try it on my own computer. :vimp:
  • lemonlimelemonlime Canada Member
    edited March 2005
    Just thought I'd run an atto on my new NF4 setup to see how it compared to the atto in the first post above. This one is with the setup in my sig. The first one was done with a DFI nF3 250GB board and the same drives (2xWD Raptors 36.7GB). This time around, I even matched the cluster/stripe size at 16K, but the reads seem too low on the high end. Writes are fairly linear. The logical volume is still quite empty, only about 20% full. I got pretty similar scores right after a fresh XP install as well.

    Any ideas? I thought the nvraid controller would be pretty much identical on the NF3 and NF4 chipsets..
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited March 2005
    Use sandra and check the latency. Usualy the writes seem higher the farther into the array then reads. Are you sure the atto's are from identical setups?

    Tex
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    I got the same pattern w/ my DFI NF4 board prior to RMA using my old Hitachi drives, just a little less on the high end. My first reaction was that it is a latency issue since it all looked like it had a lot of promise at first then petered into dramatic differences between reads and writes. Mine topped out @ 105 on the big end BTW. It also looks like adjusting the latency is locked out as it is a propritory chip based controller just like the Intel CH5's.:( My replacement board will be here today so i will get to see if my new big 2nd gen Raptors will do any better. Right now it's looking like I might keep them as separate drives if latency doesn't look better this time around.
  • lemonlimelemonlime Canada Member
    edited March 2005
    Update: Flashed to the retail 3/10 BIOS, which also updates the nvraid ROM. Not sure if this was the cause, but I did another ATTO, and the results are improved. Unfortunatly, I did a lot of system overclock tweaking around the same time, so I'm not sure if that had an impact. It is definatly improved, as there is at least 5+ gigs of additional data on the logical volume than when I did the previous atto.. I think I have about 67% free space. It is still not as linear as my NF3 atto in the first post, but at least the high end STR has returned.. :mullet:

    I may try to adjust the stripe sizing later. Has anyone got information on how to ghost nvraid volumes ?
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