New nVidia Raid Atto

FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
edited June 2005 in Hardware
Just built my new general machine and I'm actually quite impressed.
Specs:
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
A64 3700+ San Diego
1 Gig of TwinX1024-3200XL
4xHitachi SATAII 80Gig
nVidia 6800GT PCI-e 256
PC Power & Cooling Turbocool 510 Express /SLI

Atto:

Comments

  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited May 2005
    Needs some tweaking, but for a fresh install and third boot, it's OK!!
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited May 2005
    I see the same parrtern that I have been getting w/ the NF4 controller with the short end and middle way out of wack. Let me lnow if you find a way to tweak it. With 3 different sts of drives; WD's, Hitachi's and Raptor 740's. I kept getting the same pattern with every combination of stripe/cluster. I also noticed the same unbalanced pattern with drives as single drives. :mad:
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited May 2005
    That is normal, for what you have. 64K chunk your clusters, best balance in middle of range for R\W balanced.
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited May 2005
    Straight_Man wrote:
    That is normal, for what you have. 64K chunk your clusters, best balance in middle of range for R\W balanced.
    John

    I tried 4/4, 8/4, 16/16, 16/8, 16/4, 32/32, 32/16, 32/8, 64/64, 64/32 and 64/16 with the EXACT SAME PATTERN

    This one's 16/16. :scratch:

    attachment.php?attachmentid=16261&stc=1


    No matter what pair of drives or even more drives I tried the pattern persisted. But look at how terrible the short end is. And that's where Windows and most apps do most of their work! :wtf:
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited May 2005
    Sorry guys, I've been away at a conference and couldn't follow up.

    Goat, your low end looks much worse than mine, doesn't it? Especially your writes. What do you think is up with that?

    I'll have time to play with it this Holiday weekend and we'll see what I can come up with.

    Flint
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited May 2005
    Flintstone wrote:
    Sorry guys, I've been away at a conference and couldn't follow up.

    Goat, your low end looks much worse than mine, doesn't it? Especially your writes. What do you think is up with that?

    I'll have time to play with it this Holiday weekend and we'll see what I can come up with.

    Flint
    It turned out that I had one bad drive out of 3x WD740 Raptors (now on its way to be RMA'd) but w/ 2x drives it cleaned up a little but same pattern persists. I think those drives you have match up better w/ the controller and you have the power of 4 going for it. I have been looking for a fix for these controllers for a while now but no dice. I'm speculating that it is a drive/controller issue.
  • lemonlimelemonlime Canada Member
    edited May 2005
    mtgoat wrote:
    It turned out that I had one bad drive out of 3x WD740 Raptors (now on its way to be RMA'd) but w/ 2x drives it cleaned up a little but same pattern persists. I think those drives you have match up better w/ the controller and you have the power of 4 going for it. I have been looking for a fix for these controllers for a while now but no dice. I'm speculating that it is a drive/controller issue.

    Same problems here man. Strangely enough, my NF3 250GB DFI board did not exhibit this problem. I got much more linear and predictable ATTO results. One of my raptors just bit the dust as well, did you have an easy time with their RMA department? They told me my drive was 'Out of Region' and I was not eligable for replacement, wth is that eh..
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited May 2005
    lemonlime wrote:
    Same problems here man. Strangely enough, my NF3 250GB DFI board did not exhibit this problem. I got much more linear and predictable ATTO results. One of my raptors just bit the dust as well, did you have an easy time with their RMA department? They told me my drive was 'Out of Region' and I was not eligable for replacement, wth is that eh..
    My Raptor was not much more than 60 days out of the box and I didn't have much of a clue to the problem till I split them up and compared them. Then I rand the diagnostic and got the bad news. I didn't have any trouble with WD at all on the RMA. Sorry to hear you get a sucky deal with them. But I think you need to persist! :thumbsup:
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited May 2005
    I guess ists because you are in Canada. WD allows you to cross-ship the HDDs if you give them your CC #. I did and got my drive right away. It wasnt a raptor but an 80gb WD.
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    Here is a revival for ya. I decided to try putting my 2 Hitachi 80GB SATA II drives with my 2 WD 74GB Raptors. I finally got my RMA back from WD and it looks much better now. This was a very pleasant surprise. Especially after seeing what was happening above. I may just go back to running an array again. ;)
  • csimoncsimon Acadiana Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    congrats! :thumbsup:
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited June 2005
    Mr. Goat,
    Is that a 4 drive array, as you suggested in your comments, with a combo of the Raptors and Hitachis? Raid 0? What sizechunks, etc? That Atto looks so good, I might just rebuild my system if that kind of performance is available to me too!

    Thanks,

    Flint
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    Flintstone wrote:
    Mr. Goat,
    Is that a 4 drive array, as you suggested in your comments, with a combo of the Raptors and Hitachis? Raid 0? What sizechunks, etc? That Atto looks so good, I might just rebuild my system if that kind of performance is available to me too!

    Thanks,

    Flint
    Yes it is a 4 drive RAID-0. It is (2X) WD 740 Raptors and (2X) HITACHI Deskstar 7K80 80GB Serial ATA II drives in RAID-0 with 16 stripe/16 cluster. I was rather surprised myself and want to check this out further. It also went 101 on Sandra. :D
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited June 2005
    Can you guys also post some sandra benchs that show access time? For most things like the OS etc.. access time is far more important then STR. Once you get the heads moving for many scattered data access's and not just reading 32mb sequentialy etc.. which is all atto does..... With the overhead of a 4 drive IDE software raid array etc.. The access time usually suffers. But I am not "up" on these new controllers and the bus they use.

    The older controller usually for example went from 8ms access for a single drive to 12 or even 14 ms access on a 2 or 4 drive IDE array. Raptors would score better of course.

    I mean you need STR also but many forget about the access time. STR on the desktop isnt all it's cracked up to be by some.

    Thanks

    Tex
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited June 2005
    Sandra I/O bench of a 4 x 80 Gig SATAII raid0 array on NF4:
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited June 2005
    The average access time on the last 4 drive array I posted is 5.8. :D
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited June 2005
    6ms is killer.

    2ms is better but 6ms is dandy too!

    This is 4 older scsi's (atlas III's) on a elite 1600

    Tex
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