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Author Topic: Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now  (Read 120 times)

67thRaptorBull

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« on: August 19, 2004, 09:22:00 AM »

ok, so i have a raid 0 array of sata hdd's on the via raid controller on an asus k8v se deluxe

the hard drives are (2) western digital raptors (36 gigs)

the highest score ive gotten when i benchmarked them was 87mb/s

but now all im getting out of the drives is 57mb/s when they should be averaging around 110 mb/s

and the seek and write times are 2x as slow (instead of 5m/s for seek and write, its around 10 or 11 m/s)

is there anyway or software that will optimize the performance or diagnose if theres a problem??

thanks
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mcmikemc

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #1 on: August 19, 2004, 09:38:00 AM »

QUOTE (67thRaptorBull @ Aug 19 2004, 05:25 PM)
ok, so i have a raid 0 array of sata hdd's on the via raid controller on an asus k8v se deluxe

the hard drives are (2) western digital raptors (36 gigs)

the highest score ive gotten when i benchmarked them was 87mb/s

but now all im getting out of the drives is 57mb/s when they should be averaging around 110 mb/s

and the seek and write times are 2x as slow (instead of 5m/s for seek and write, its around 10 or 11 m/s)

is there anyway or software that will optimize the performance or diagnose if theres a problem??

thanks

The problem is that the RAID chips are connected to the PCI bus. So you will never be able to get much better than what you are getting right now with your current solution.

The seek times of 5m/s is marketing on the HD makers part. It is like the watts that most stereo makers claim for their products. Those numbers a come up with in some crazy labs experiment and are not RL numbers.

I have the same RAID chips you have on your motherboard ( I got the pretty much the same MB just mine is MSI ). The RAID you can make with the chips is still better than 1 drive but not much much better like I had hoped.

I stopped using the RAID 0 and went to a single drive setup because I would lose the RAID once every 1-2 months. The performance is 80% of the RAID and I have not had a crash yet.
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67thRaptorBull

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #2 on: August 19, 2004, 10:17:00 AM »

wait

raid arrays crash that easily?

why?


and how come i was at 89mb/s, but now it dropped down to 59mb/s?


should i be that worried that my raid will fail?
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mcmikemc

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #3 on: August 19, 2004, 10:28:00 AM »

QUOTE (67thRaptorBull @ Aug 19 2004, 06:20 PM)
wait

raid arrays crash that easily?

why?


and how come i was at 89mb/s, but now it dropped down to 59mb/s?


should i be that worried that my raid will fail?

When you are talking about HD crashes you talk about the property called fault tolerance.

One hard drive has lets say a fault tolerance of 1. When you have a RAID 0 setup your fault tolerance is at .5. If you have a RAID 1 setup your tolerance is at 2.

The bad thing about RAID 0 is if you have a little problem with a drive your partition is shot to hell.

The RAID chips on the MB are not the best in the world so they are more prone to crash.

You just need to make sure you don't have any files that you can't live without on the RAID 0 partion. If you do your asking for problems.
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67thRaptorBull

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2004, 10:38:00 AM »

nah, everything i have is on cd (i had to transfer shit from my old comp to my new comp) so if the hdd goes to hell all i have to redownload is small time shit

if all im doing is gaming and web surfing, is it an investment to get a better raid controller for faster speeds, or is it not worth it?
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mcmikemc

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2004, 11:06:00 AM »

QUOTE (67thRaptorBull @ Aug 19 2004, 06:41 PM)
nah, everything i have is on cd (i had to transfer shit from my old comp to my new comp) so if the hdd goes to hell all i have to redownload is small time shit

if all im doing is gaming and web surfing, is it an investment to get a better raid controller for faster speeds, or is it not worth it?

You could get a PCI caontroller card but it is still going through the PCI bus like those onboard chips you and I have. Your speed will pretty much not incease at all. Stripping arrays are really good for databases or applications where your alwasy reading and writing data.

A RAID 0 is cool for games because the load time decrease but I don't rhink it is worth it for the 2-5 seconds you save espicaly when your system is more likely to fail.
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67thRaptorBull

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2004, 11:33:00 AM »

yea, well either way i would need to reinstall everything just to get off the raid array
and i like raid 0 array because i like just having 1 big hdd from the 2 small ones

also, i dont think the hdd's will fail just like that, it probably will need a reason to fail on me
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mcmikemc

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #7 on: August 19, 2004, 11:55:00 AM »

QUOTE (67thRaptorBull @ Aug 19 2004, 07:36 PM)
yea, well either way i would need to reinstall everything just to get off the raid array
and i like raid 0 array because i like just having 1 big hdd from the 2 small ones

also, i dont think the hdd's will fail just like that, it probably will need a reason to fail on me

It is not just a physical failure that I am talking about. If a few files don't get written correctly then BAM you have to reinstall. Go read up on this on a forum that talks about this. You will see that people reinstall RAID 0 allot.

I am not saying don't do it, I am just saying you should expect it to fail down the road.
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67thRaptorBull

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #8 on: August 19, 2004, 02:10:00 PM »

i guess i will read into this

because im not understanding on how if a few files (do you mean if i install something like a game or app) dont get put on the hdd, that cuases the whole system to get fucked over

i though hdd's and systems only do that if its a windows file, or something important, not a game or movie
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mcmikemc

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #9 on: August 19, 2004, 02:34:00 PM »

QUOTE (67thRaptorBull @ Aug 19 2004, 10:13 PM)
i guess i will read into this

because im not understanding on how if a few files (do you mean if i install something like a game or app) dont get put on the hdd, that cuases the whole system to get fucked over

i though hdd's and systems only do that if its a windows file, or something important, not a game or movie

Thats the best thing to do.

I had been writting a paper for work for around 5 days. Put around 40 hours into it. I finished it up around 9:00pm one night and played some Far Cry until I went to sleep. I woke up the next day and booted up my PC and BAM my partition is farked up.

After that I said screw it.
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67thRaptorBull

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #10 on: August 19, 2004, 03:53:00 PM »

hmmm. well, if it happens once within a very short time period then ill just use the two seperate, but since i have everything i want on my comp (minus new halo vids, pics, small shit  like that) and everything big i want on my comp is also on cd, i mine as well wait to see if it fails because either way im going to have to reload the info, so mine as well see

thanks for the help

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mcmikemc

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #11 on: August 19, 2004, 04:31:00 PM »

QUOTE (67thRaptorBull @ Aug 19 2004, 11:56 PM)
hmmm. well, if it happens once within a very short time period then ill just use the two seperate, but since i have everything i want on my comp (minus new halo vids, pics, small shit  like that) and everything big i want on my comp is also on cd, i mine as well wait to see if it fails because either way im going to have to reload the info, so mine as well see

thanks for the help

Yea,

I forgot to add above that I had it fail twice before I stop reinstalling it.

Now I have a 200g IDE drive with all my files. I then compy it over to my 60g USB drive and every 3 months I burn a DVD of my critical files.
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67thRaptorBull

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Ok, This Is Pissing Me Off Now
« Reply #12 on: August 19, 2004, 07:44:00 PM »

yea, like i said, i dont have any critical files

just games, internet apps, shit like that
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