RAID Setup

If I want to setup IDE RAID 0, what is the best setting for clusters? 64, 128 or 256? And what is the difference?

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391 Posts
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Joined 1999-07-24
If I want to setup IDE RAID 0, what is the best setting for clusters? 64, 128 or 256?
And what is the difference?

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1615 Posts
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Joined 2000-03-25
i would like to know this as well i have raid 0 right now with 64k clusters and it is working quite well but i am thinking about repartitioning my array when xp beta 2 comes out and i would like to know if one of the other cluster sizes gives better performance.

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391 Posts
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Joined 1999-07-24
OP
What is better, set one HD as Primary master and Second as Primary slave or
One as Primary master and second as Primary slave (RAID 0 setup)
 
From what I read it does makes a difference, but I can't remember the relation and I lost the link
 
How do you like you RAID setup? any problems? Hows the performance?

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13 Posts
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Set both as master. That way both disks can be accessed through each of the ide-channels and at the same time.

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391 Posts
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Joined 1999-07-24
OP
Well.. Last weekind was spend rebuilding the rig... will see if the RAID0 can be
reliable in a long run.
 
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AMD Thunderbird 1000
MSI-TurboR
768 Pc133 Ram CAS3
1x30 7200 Maxtor
2x30 7200 Maxtor (IDE Raid0)
6x4x24 Creative Burner
5.1 Creative Live Value
5.1 DTS 35000 Creative Speakers
TNT2-Ultra Creative (time 2 go)
6x DVD Slot-Load
Alpha CPU Fan
19' Samsung 900FT
Microsoft Optical Mouse
Microsoft Natural Keyboard

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1615 Posts
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Joined 2000-03-25
I have mine set to raid 0 with both hard drives set to master. I have been using this setup for a while now and have had no problems with it. As 5731 said it is better to have them on separte ide channels. That is why all the drives in my system are on separate cables and why i bought an additional controller card for my storage drive even though i could have run it on the onbaord controller or on my original raid card.
I would still like to know if 64k blocks are the best or if larger blocks gives better performance. I imagine that there must be some performance diff as all the raid controllers that i have seen have this opption. I would test them all out and post benchmarks but that would take me for ever considering you have to reinstall everything to make this change.
 
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My System
Dell Demension XPS T500
Triple Boot
Windows 2000 Pro 2195
Windows Whistler Pro 2428
Windows Millennium Final Retail
PIII @ 500 Mhz (with after market heatsink and dual fan)
512 Megs Ram
Guillemot Maxi Gammer Cougar (TNT2 M64 w/ 32 Megs of RAM)
Matrox Millennium PCI (w/ 4 Megs of RAM for second monitor)
3Com Etherlink XL 10/100 Ethernet Card
2 x Abit Hot Rod Pro ATA-100 RAID Controlers
2 x 12.6 Gig Maxtor Hard Disks RAID 0 (for system)
1 76.3 Gig Maxtor Hard Disk (for storage)
40X LG CD Rom Drive
100 Mb Iomega Internal Zip Drive
MS Explorer Mouse
MS Natural Keyboard Pro

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391 Posts
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Joined 1999-07-24
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If I remeber correctly some site that compared RAIDs said that setting ya RAID clusters to 1/2 the size of you HD clusters provides the best performance. They recommended going with 64 or 128 depending on HD size

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1615 Posts
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Joined 2000-03-25
I primarily use NTFS with a 4096 byte allocation unit size. Is that the same as cluster size. If so would it make sense for me to use 4k clusters in my RAID 0 setup. I can't go lower than 4K and i can't go higher than 64K so i wonder what i should do. I have one FAT 32 partition aswell will that be affected the same way. Or will it even be a noticeable diff? I think I need to go do some research and find this sh1t out cause i want to be getting the best possible performance out of my hardware.

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391 Posts
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Joined 1999-07-24
OP
Here is something I dug up from www.voidyourwarranty.com :
 
Setting up a physical array is very easy, you simply select two hard drives, both on the same channel and set one as a boot drive and the other as the secondary. Set the stripe block, which should be larger than the cluster size (preferably two times the size of your average cluster size, aka 32k clusters = 64k stripe block prefferably), setup the physical partitions, format, and your good to go.