What raid stripe size should I go for?

#1 I.Tstudent

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Posted 24 May 2011 - 12:15 PM

Hi

I built a new computer. It has an I7 950 Quad core with hyper threading and 6GB of DDR3 ram. When I purchased my two hard drive WD 1TB each at 7200rpm, I thought they would be ok. When I load my backup to the system, the OS becomes sluggish. I did ram tests and malware checks. The only conclusion is my hard drives are a bottle neck. The disk qeue was set a 1 in performance manager. This should be below 1 as far as im aware, it was also highlighted in red by the system.

My mobo supports raid hardware setup. I created a raid 0 at 128k size. Seems to function quickly. But I got traped in the world of changing the sizes to see whats better. I changed the size to 16k and again, seems to be ok.

Another question, striping doesent increase the spindle speed (7200rpm), it just increase the read and write speed?

I have dual booted the system, win 7 pro for normal work. I plan on getting a good game (not really the gaming type, but want to try out on the new system). The other partition is server 2008 r2 with hyper V. I use this to create test network. It was here that I found everything sluggish to load, to the point I was cracking up :/

#2 Sneakycyber

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Posted 30 May 2011 - 04:15 AM

I am assuming the drives are SATA? Have you enabled SATA in the BIOS? By.default most motherboards operate in legacy or IDE emulation mode

~Chad Mockensturm~
Hardware & Networking Analyst

#3 I.Tstudent

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Posted 30 May 2011 - 05:30 AM

Yeah bios and raid driver is sorted. My networking tutor said a 64 bit system will need 128. So I have stuck with that. I also moved my page file to an non raid drive that I borrowed from college. This brought my disk queue length down to 0.26 when the system was idle. When it was actually ding something like downloading updates and running a cd at the same time it averaged at 2- 6.
The non raid drive had major problems and crashed my system three times.

I'm now using ready boast, with a 2gb flash pen. It seems to do the job. I bought cod4 and it plays well, but sometimes there is a bit of lag. I may have to buy a no thrid drive and put my paging file on it, as the paging file needs to be 6gb plus 2 or something.