Raid controller comes in tomorrow, any tips?

[silenkiller]

Well, I pulled the trigger on 4 500 gig SEAGATE ST3500418A .12's and a ARECA ARC-1220. Hoping to try several configurations while trying to obtain 170mb avg writes.

Any tips or little things I should know/do before or after putting this in tomorrow? First time I've setup raid.

Oh, going on win7 64bit btw

 

[geofelt]

what is your objective? protection or performance?

 

[silenkiller]

Well, I need to hit a high write speed. I'ma try raid 5, then prolly 10, and if none of them do it for me I'll have to go with raid 0 for the time being.

 

[geofelt]

Any of the protection oriented raid modes(1,5,10 etc.) will hurt your write throughput. That is because extra writes of some form are required to put the protection(duplicate record, parity info) out to the extra hard drive.
If your output is of a sequential nature, then raid-0 might be ok since writes can be alternated between two different hard drives.

The first thing to do is to separate the input and output files on separate hard drives. That will minimize the seek time by keeping the read/write heads in about the same place. You might want to create two raid-0 arrays of two drives each; one for input, and one for output.

If more than two files are involved, it might be best to use 4 separate drives and forgo raid. Just use the raid card and it's cache buffer to speed things up.

Do some testing to find out the best solution. Do post the results of your tests here, I would be interested.

 

[Neogrizz]

I suggest you use RAID-10. RAID-0 with 4 drives will work fast, but a high risk of losing al data. RAID-5 uses parity and slows the writing down. RAID-10 does not use parity, but a combination of striping and mirroring. In read performance it's fast because it can read from all drives at the same time. The performance will be almost the same as RAID-0. In writing it is somewhat slower. Do you have an other RAID set? If this is the only set you will have then don't expect average writes of 170MB. You will only be able to reach that kind of speed by copying data from one RAID-set to the other.

 

[silenkiller]

Well, just finally got this baby rollen. Realized i'm short a couple sata power connectors so I'll have to see about picking some adapters up for my extra molex's.

Right now I have 3 HD's running in raid 0 on the controller, 339MB/s Read, 361 MB/s Write. Needless to say I'm impressive as hell at those speeds lol. Can't test raid 10 until I get that adapter and get the 4th hd rollen.

 

[silenkiller]

Raid 10



Raid 0


O.O im impressed