Hi all,
I had wonderful couple days trying to install a WinXP-SP2 onto a RAID volume with 128kb stripe and 32kb cluster size. Seems 4kb clusters is Mr. Gates choice for us all now........ yeah right, and pigs fly!
Thanks to a cool windows deployment utility and NickN's help, I was able to build a WinXP-SP2 disk that actually installs onto larger than 4kb cluster size formatted drives. So there, Bill!
This is a "slowish" Seagate 80gb ATA100 7200rpm 8mb cache HDD and it's benchmark speed, note average speeds.....
This is an older Seagate 80gb ATA100 7200rpm HDD WITHOUT the 8mb cache, it's a faster drive surprisingly.
This is the above two drives converted to a RAID-0 array using WIN XP's disk management utility by first converting the drives to dynamic disks then configuring them as a striped RAID-0 array and formatting them with a 32kb cluster size. This is really easy to set up but software raid is not as fast as hardware raid.
The average speed here is not as good as it should be due to the software overhead and the poor performance of one of the drives, though, it isn't bad considering the crippling effect of the 40mb/sec drive.
I also have an onboard nVidia RAID controller with 2 x 200gb WD SATA2 HDD's in a RAID-0 array on that controller.
These HDD's are a bit faster due to being SATA2's with a moderate capacity.
It wasn't possible to test them on their own for this report
Note the high average speed on this array compared to the software RAID array above.
My real world performance seems to be very much in line with the synthetic tests above, at least proportionately when I copy large game folders from one directory to another. I am doing controlled copies of large game folders and comparing results by timing the transfers.
I'm just messing around with this configuration, I doubt i'll keep my backup disks as a software RAID-0 array, I just wanted to mess about and see how this stuff works.
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