Intel Matrix Raid0 Stripe and Cluster size

flip · Post by **flip** » Fri Jun 13, 2008 8:03 pm

Just bought 2 400 gig drives. Plan making 2 partitons on a Intel matrix raid0 array. My average file size for my OS partition is 427KB. For the storage partition, 8367 KB.

Any recommendations on Cluster and Stripe size?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Jun 13, 2008 9:12 pm

My 800 GB RAID0 is plenty fast at all defaults (4 KB cluster, 64 KB stripe).

But installing your OS on it is a bad idea. First it means your OS needs RAID drivers, which isn't a huge pain, but isn't painless either. Second, RAID0 volumes have abysmal access latencies in exchange for more sequential bandwidth. What it means? Most of the reads and writes the OS startup and day to day programs use the most are random in nature, so the speed advantage of RAID0 is nullified by the excessive random access latency. And third, it uses more CPU time during disk access than a single drive.

flip · Post by **flip** » Fri Jun 13, 2008 9:21 pm

I have a good image with the raid drivers already installed so thats not a problem. So your saying use a single disk for the OS and then pair the 2 400 gig up in an array? Or just to forget about raid altogether?

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Fri Jun 13, 2008 10:10 pm

os and swap. everything else can go on the RAID.

Warlock · Post by **Warlock** » Sun Jun 15, 2008 9:35 am

How I have my setup I have a 250gb drive for the OS and I don't have a stripe raid but I have a mirror 2 1tb drives. cause if the OS dies or the drive does then I just reinstall or get a new drive and all my real data is safe.

Its worth just getting a drive just for the OS

flip · Post by **flip** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 2:02 pm

Well this is what I ended up doing. I set the 2 new hard drives in a raid0 and left the operating system on my original hard drive. I then added a partition on the raid0 and installed windows xp there too. On my machine I can choose to boot from whichever disk so I can either boot to the raid0 xp or the one on the non-member disk.

That served 2 purposes really. Now I can boot from the non-member disk and and see for myself how having OS on 1 hard disk and a raid0 for storage, or see how the raid0 performs for the OS and having the non-member disk for storage and backups.

I have to say, the raid0 is super fast. I transferred 20 gig of music in 6 minutes so I'm pretty happy with that.

The biggest advantage to this setup though, is since I only have 30 days to return these to Newegg, an array of the 2 should test both equally and if one is gonna fail, hopefully it will before the 30 days is up.