aight i got 2 quick questions about my raid 0 setup.

#1. What block size do u guys suggest? I'm deciding between 64kB or 32kB..................tell me what u guys suggest.

#2. I have two WD1200JB (8mB cache) hard drives in a raid 0 array and when i benchmark my drives in SiSoft Sandra, the result is almost the same or lower than an individual WD1200JB!!! I also noticed that the "buffered write" score was only about 15mb/sec when on a single drive it's about 40-45mb/sec!!! Can someone please help me out with this, because i have no idea what is going on...........

Thanks alot.........hope to hear from someone soon.

What are you going to use the raid for?

A lot of very small files, a lot of larger files, or a mix of the two?

The block size setting depends on what you're going to use it for... If you're going for lots of (very) small files, 32kb will save you some diskspace, but if you're going for larger files (mp3's, divx's etc) you might be better off with a larger block size...

So until you tell us more, it's hard to help you out with what size to use...

I dunno about #2...

#2... do you know that you can get 40-45mb/sec ? or is that was SiS Sandra tells you as a comparison? if you know you can get that from using the drives singally, i'd do that (stating the obvious) or if thats what Sandra's saying by comparison, it's prolly a crap RAID driver.

Hope that makes sense.

I theory, what Mr Garibaldi is saying about the block size is correct, however in practice you will find that there will be a specific "sweet spot" for your particular controller. If you do a search on www.tomshardware.com you will find a particle telling you the values.

Ok I got the block sizes correct.........thanks for that info,
but i'm still havin a problem with the benchmarks. In SiSoft Sandra 2003 my two WD 1200JB drives in a raid 0 array are reading the same or sometimes slower than a single WD 1200JB drive. Anybody else havin probs with sisoft HDD benchmarking or is it just me? I need these benchmarks to work because I want to compare performance between my single drive and Raid setup.
Thanks for your replies so far, keep em coming
- Tarrick......

is SiSoft Sandra 2003 raid aware??

yea sisoft is.............at least i think it is, because it has raid drive benchmarks for comparison......
remember the only score which i think is off is the buffer write score of only 15mb/Sec..........while reading around, i've learned that single drives record about 40Mb/s.
I'm wonderin if its a problem with Sisoft Sandra or my drives......

Does the array actually seem slow to use? I mean, it is slow to read and write to? try to just make an observational benchmark, comparing copying a few large files (over 500MB) and many megabytes of smaller files. Look and see if you can kind another free benchmarking program and try that.