Agility 2 raid 0 seems slow

[pabloottawa]

Hey guys,

I just installed 2 Agility 2 60Gb drives in raid 0 and all seems OK but I'm noticing that games are NOT loading any faster and they reside on the SSD drives. Did I miss something in the setup? Do I have to adjust something on the drives or the MB bios????

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Processor: i7 930 2.8 stock @ 4.01
Motherboard: Asus P6T
Cooling: Corsair H70
Memory: 6 x 2Gb Kingston Value RAM triple channel
Video Card: ASUS ENGTX560 TI DCII/2DI/1GD5 SLI
Hard Disk: 2 Seagate Barracudas in RAID 0 and 2 OCZ Agility 2's in RAID 0. Both RAID 0 setups are running Windows 7
Optical Drive: LG Blu Ray Burner
CRT/LCD Model: HP 2509 LCD 25"
Case: Coler Master HAF 922
Sound Card: Realtek High Audi 7.1
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Power 1000W
Software: Win 7 x64

 

[4745454b]

System specs? Remember that there is more to loading a game then just reading data off a drive. There is a lot of CPU activity.

 

[pabloottawa]

done... could it be my stripe size???? I set it to 64kb but deleted the raid array and formatted the drives until I find out if I should be setting it to 128kb.


so is there a rule of thumb? As in

60gb drives in raid 0 = 64 kb stripe

or is it

60gb drives in raid 0 = 128? kb stripe

 

[4745454b]

Are they on the same SATA controller? I could see differences in speeds if one is on a different controller.

What games are you testing on? As I said there is more to loading games then just reading info off the disks. If you already had an AID0 array and could get 300MB read speeds from it, how long will it take you to read a GB of game data? (hint, less then 4 seconds.) If your SSDs can hit 500MBs, how long now? 2 seconds? Can you detect less then 2 seconds off difference?

 

[pabloottawa]

Yes they are on the same sata controller (sata 1 and sata 2) 10CHR.

I'm running Bad company 2 and Silent Hunter 5 and I noticed that the load times were either as fast or slightly slower than my HDD raid0 setup.

Off the top of my head I would say the games loaded on the SSD OS were about 5-10 seconds slower.

ON SILENT HUNTER 5..... The load times were MUCH MUCH slower I'd say by almost a minute.

Very strange....

 

[4745454b]

That is odd. They aren't running in IDE mode are they?

 

[pabloottawa]

God no!! Definitely in raid as far as bios is concerned. Is there another place to check?

 

[4745454b]

Hmmm, puzzling. Hopefully someone smarter then I will come along and provide the answer. I can see the load times being similar, but the SSDs shouldn't be slower.

 

[groberts101]

not sure if the Agility 2 suffered from the same issue as the Vertex 2's did(doubtful).. but you should check to be sure that both drives are of the same capacity. Each shold be 55GB's shown in bios or the RST raid mgr app. If not then you have a 51GB drive with 64GBit memory chips and would need to RMA the smaller 51GB drive.

Also be aware that write caching is ALWAYS disabled by default regardless of the divice mgrs/drive properties tab being checked by default in all W7 installs. Either use the RST raid mgr app to enable write-back caching or go into device mgr/drive props and uncheck write caching>click ok> recheck it and click OK to activate it. These 2 setting are one and the same.


and an FYI... you should ALWAYS secure erase these drives when reinstalling as formatting will not wipe the controllers mapping/registers and return fresh speed. Only secure erasing can do that by eliminating Durawrite from the picture.

 

[pabloottawa]

Thanks guys,

I ran some tests using AS SSD Benchmark and it revealed 128kb to be the best stripe size so I reformatted and reinstalled windows on the Raid 0 setup. Once everything was finalized, all drivers installed and everything running smoothly I did the write caching trick Roberts mentioned so now it's just a matter of getting some game sin to see how fast they load. We'll see I guess. Update soon!!!

 

[groberts101]

but you missed the most importatnt info there. ALWAYS secure erase before any new install.

These drives have a process called Durawrite and as the map gets fully formed as more data is added(as in multiple installs and tests) it WILL throttle the drive into what's called a settled state.

here's a monster of a read to understand these controllers. Just keep the tissues handy as you'll likely get nose bleeds from all the info there.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?85029-Understanding-SF1200-drives-TRIM-OP-area-use-and-Life-write-throttle

 

[pabloottawa]

Pretty sure I did secure erase.... Damm! Now you have me wondering. Is there any way to know is it was done or not now that I've installed the OS?
I'll probably format and do it all over again soon just to be sure.

Thanks for all the help everyone. Much appreciated

 

[pabloottawa]

Best answer selected by pabloottawa.