Switching to RAID0 made no difference in my Windows Experience index

[siavash_EE]

according to the windows experience index on my Win7 machine, the bottleneck on my system performance was by my primary HDD holding me down at 5.9. I had a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache. so I went out and bought 2 Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache and set them as a RAID0 zero with a stripe size of 64k.

after installing a fresh copy of Win7 and running the windows index thing again. I was Extremely disappointed to see that my HDD performance was still pinning me down at 59

is this because of my stripe size? or that the caviar blue has a slightly lower performance than the Seagate barracuda?

should I be even concerned with the windows index? is there a better measure of my machines over all performance out there?

 

[ahthurungnone]

Your problem is that no matter how the data is stored on a standard hard drive, the drive must receive the request, move the "arm" to the specific point on the platter, and then read and send the information.

I'm not sure what we are all going to do until SSDs become reasonably priced.

 

[NetworkStorageTips]

SSD's are reasonably priced now.

I picked up some new Kingstons's (64GB) on special for $95.

Use the SSD for your Windows, boot drive.

Anything that is larger can go on a 2nd hard drive, and external drive or - my choice obviously - a NAS device that runs RAID (not RAID 0) to protect your data.

RAID 0 is nothing but trouble, read all the threads here on that.

And don't forget to BACKUP!!

Best,
Roger.

 

[siavash_EE]

its not the price, its the effin unreliability. I had an ADATA 32gig which had good reviews from newegg, it died after 63 days! just in time for my return period to be over, and I lost 3 weeks worth game play on DOWII :/ :/ :/ and I had to install everything all over again. can't be going through that again.

 

[rock3246]

Reasonably priced now?!? $95 for 64 freakin gb? that is ridiculous no matter how fast and energy efficient it is. Unless you are a millionaire

 

[Brawndo]

I don't really consider the Windows Experience index to be a very accurate benchmark. Using HDTune has been very educational for me, I highly recommend that app for getting a more informative look at your drives' performance.

Using an SSD for boot drive and a pair of 2TB HDDs in RAID1 is my hybrid storage combo of choice for the moment. SSDs really excel over HDDs in scenarios where you've got lots and lots of little random reads and writes going on like you do on your system disk. This is because the SSD has a latency that's more than 100 times faster than the average HDD (.1ms vs ~10ms), which like NetworkStorageTips mentioned is due to the HDDs need to physically seek the needed sectors. The SSD only has to access the needed addresses, an entirely electrical process.

However SSDs are NOT great for copying big files (big sequential read/write) and in some cases are slower than modern HDDs for that type of task.