So I bought a Netcell 3100 sata raid controller and 5x80gb WD800JD drives to speed up my computer since i typically find myself waiting on the hard drives, but I got odd results when I benchmarked them. In a 2 drive raid 0 they averaged 81 MB/s which seemed decent, but in a 4 drive raid 0 they only averaged 73MB/s which struck me as odd. Then moving on to the 5 drive raid 3 which is the way I intended to run them I got only 71MB/s. The card does have a XOR processor and 64megs of cache but is only on a 33mhz pci bus...any ideas why they performed so badly in other modes?
lexluthermiester
Distinguished
- Nov 27, 2006
- 93
- 0
- 18,630
lexluthermiester
Distinguished
- Nov 27, 2006
- 93
- 0
- 18,630
?!? The card has xor, 64mb cache and no raid 5? What the squirrelly? Yes the parity is the bottleneck. Have you tried increasing the cluster size to say 32 or 64 k? This will speed things up, but at the cost of fragmentation.
lexluthermiester
Distinguished
- Nov 27, 2006
- 93
- 0
- 18,630
You could also try 2 raid 0 sets. It'd be 2 500gb drives but you would get the most out of your card...
Yeah it's a bit of an odd card, I was suprised at the lack of raid 5 as well. But I got 3 of them given to me so I can't argue. Looks like it would have been a better idea to pick up a few smaller raptors and raid 0ing them. Anyway I'm thinking about getting This card. What kinda performance would I be looking at with 4 drives in raid 5 on that? Or should I just sell it all and get 2 raptors? Sorry I'm a bit of a noob to raid :lol:
lexluthermiester
Distinguished
- Nov 27, 2006
- 93
- 0
- 18,630
That's a great card. If I had your setup, I'd do the raid 5 thing once you get the new card. Be sure to set your cluster size to 64k or 128k to keep performance on a good level. Use that fifth 250 for a spare. I've been doing the raid thing since the good old SCSI days. I currently use sata raid 5 with 4 320gb wd and I'm about 92mb sec minimum. I was using 2 raptor 150's in raid 0, and 2 200gb in a raid 0 as well[both array's on the same card] and the 200's were only about 3% slower. Raptors are great for single drive use, but in a raid array they don't make that big a deal. So stick with your 250's, for a raid array they're great.
lexluthermiester
Distinguished
- Nov 27, 2006
- 93
- 0
- 18,630
You're very welcome, glad I could help. Let me know how it turns out, and if you have any questions setting up a raid 5 array, let me know. I'd be happy to walk you through it.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram