Raid

[Happy Go Lucky]

I've just bought 2 ata 133 maxtor plus 9 60 Gb hdd. For use in my abit kx7. I followed the instructions but i'm not sure if i've done it right. I created a Raid 0 array with one hdd on master, and the other on slave. With 64k. I selected the master as the boot disc, the other was hidden, I installed win2k by pressing f6 to install the 3rd party drivers. I get size available as roughly120gb, should this not be 60gb as RAID 0 using striping.
Also when I ran sandra filesystem benchmark I only got 21k, I was expecting double this according to the comparisons my old ata100 5200rpm was also about that much. In PCmark my score was 1100.

Have I done something wrong?, thanks

 

[Embattle]

1. Put both drives as primary on different cables, so one drive goes on the end of IDE3 and the other on IDE4.
2. With striping (Raid 0) you gain the full hard drive space, so it is 2 x 60 =120....just under once formatted. If you mirror (Raid 1) then you would only have 60GB as the other 60GB is used to exactly copy the one drive.

 

[Happy Go Lucky]

Do I have to create the array again? , or can I just attach another cable?

 

[Embattle]

Depends if the RAID got setup properly in the RAID BIOS.

 

[Happy Go Lucky]

That's much better now get about 30k in sandra. Tho I'm still underperforming equivalent ata100 raid 0 7200rpm drives.

Just a few questions :-

Do I have to select a boot disk in the raid setup, as I didn't, and it worked fine?

What difference does changing the block size make? Is higher better or lower? I left the default of 64k?

Thanks very much

 

[Embattle]

As the two Hard Drives are seen as one it should automatically boot.

Block size can make a difference some times, I found 32k fairly good myself.

 

[Testin da Cable]

that selecting a 'boot' drive sounds strange. your raid controler presents a logical drive for you to work with. fiddling with it's physical subdrives shouldn't have to happen.

it's not block size, it's stripe size. tbrh, you can assume they do about the same thing at this level. the stripe size matters, and can be tuned to maximum performance if you like. fiddle with it can see. there is no 'bigger == better' rule. it's something like memory page size*X iirc. too early for me this day to suddenly remember all I know about raid. do a google. as you only have two drives just look fo r a good setting that works for you. remember: if you change your stripesize you'll have to rebuild your array. this is only fun if you're not booting off it heh