Did i setup my raid 0 correctly?

[digitalraven]

Ok to start off i decided to redo my installation of windows to start off fresh. Im running windows 7 x64.

I have 2 x WD raptors 150gb each, bout a year and a half old. And a Seagate 1TB HD.

I first used the raid utility by hitting cntrl + i to delete my raid 0 volume. I then created the volume with the two WD raptors.

Exited the utility and began the installation of my OS after creating a partition on my "raid" disk. (To get rid of the 100MB partition used for the system backup crap)

After completing the setup i downloaded matrix storage manager and enabled write back cache.

My bios is setup correctly for raid, im just second guessing my process on how i did this.

Did i screw up anywhere? i just want to know im getting the best speed out of the raid 0 setup.


Mobo - Asus max extreme with Q6600 Go

 

[LePhuronn]

If the RAID creation utility reported it was created successfully and you can install your OS to it then the RAID's fine.

You're not getting the best out of your RAID 0 because you're using onboard software RAID instead of a dedicated RAID card, but that's not a fault on your part.

 

[digitalraven]

Thanks for the reply. Glad to see i did it right. Will a dedicated raid card show massive speed improvement?

 

[LePhuronn]

As far as you'll see probably not. For serious data processing and benchmarking you'll see the benefits of hardware RAID.

I wouldn't worry though - onboard RAID is cool and today's processors have more than enough oomph to handle it.

 

[sminlal]

RAID 0 doesn't add any extra processing burden on the CPU other than the few instructions required to decide which drive the data is located on. Unlike redundant RAID levels (such as 1, 0+1, 5, etc), RAID 0 doesn't require any extra I/Os than for non-RAID drives, and there are no parity calculations either.

Compared to the instruction burden required by the file system just to figure out where the appropriate data is, and the work done by the device driver to translate file system calls into actual I/O requests for the drive, those extra couple of instructions needed to decide which drive to access are completely insignificant.

For RAID 0, there's no appreciable overhead in using the motherboard chipset RAID solution.

Actually, in modern processors even RAID 5 (which requires a lot more work than RAID 0 to run in software) only consumes a few percent of CPU time.