Say hello to my little friends - VelociRaptors in RAID 0

[/dev/null]

The original post got eaten with the site redesign, but added a pair of VelociRaptors to my gaming rig.

So far, pretty pleased with the drives themselves. Not the sort of thing I'd expect to add FPS to my games - but it took about 25% off load times for my work VM's I deal with when I'm not wrenching a sentry gun.

Still using the mainboard's 780i RAID. 3ware card is headed to the server. Performance is better than I had expected for software based RAID. I can see I'm out of SATA slots, however... so might have to add in a controller card anyhow.

By way of comparison, a 150G raptor in stand alone mode...

The single most challenging thing, at this point, was finding a viable floppy disk! I forgot the last time I did this, I created a custom install CD that had the drivers and patches on it. Not this time. So when XP-64 got to the 'time for your floppy' step, I actually had to dig up an old floppy drive, AOL disk, and plug everything in again. (I hear Vista is clever enough to use a USB thumb drive...)

Temperature is quite good. Under heavy load, I'm getting ~38C with the factory heat sinks on. No real reason to pull them off as I've got plenty of room in the chassis. By way of comparison, I get temps ~43C on the 150G raptor. Drives are quiet enough for me.

Next step: time to transplant into a case (former Sun 180) and clean up the spaghetti wiring.

 

[MrQ]

I wonder if someone can be in love with a hard drive...

 

[Arn0t]

ahhh the velicoraptors... if only i could have the money for 2 of them

still very nice, and you are making me envious

 

[Badger]

i kinda fell in love with that case. Retro.

i like how you've managed to make more than double your average.... cheater

good stuff man.

 

[xKodiakx]

pretty sweet, my question hopefully you can answer, why is the burst rate so low? aren't the new Raptors SATAII? which would theoreticaly increase performance all around, my normal 250GB Seagate bursts at 200+


Just curious for future reference.

 

[/dev/null]

pretty sweet, my question hopefully you can answer, why is the burst rate so low? aren't the new Raptors SATAII? which would theoreticaly increase performance all around, my normal 250GB Seagate bursts at 200+


Just curious for future reference.

I'm thinking it is the built in controller... I benched my Seagate 750G drive too - which I've been happy as a data drive.

Compare the same drives with a Areca ARC-1222 PCIe 8x controller - full details here.

150G Raptor w/ Areca controller

300Gx2 RAID-0 w/ Areca controller

So yah, there is something up. I used the Windows drivers rather than the NVidia drivers. When I used the NVidia drivers, it disables SMART on this board! Actually, I got this from the support guys:

For this motherboard Nvidia has stopped support for the SMART option through BIOS the only other option to use that is to run VISTA and from there you will let windows install the default drivers for this to enable any support for SMART features. EVGA Tech Support

Not cool. On WinXP-64, the Windows drivers still support SMART too... but I'm wondering what I'm paying in terms of performance to get a heads up that the drives might be going down. So the mainboard controller is less than impressive this time around.

 

[xKodiakx]

So then a lot of people out there unknowingly are losing performance because of the built in controllers on some boards.

I plan on using a RAID0 on my board when I get it finished it's an Inel x48 with ICH9R SB, maybe we can compair #'s I unfortunately won't be getting VRaptors but I can throw some #'s for the reference.


I want to get one of those Areca's but so expensive.... I was thinking maybe a HighPoint, for RAID 0 it shouldn't require too much hardware as RAID5 or 6 would.

 

[Gunning]

Hey Dev, i got the new velociraptors and am getting ready to install them. For reference, here is the HD Tune run on my current 2x150gb raptor RAID 0 (using MB controller on my evga 780i):

If you get a chance, check out my thread on imaging and restoring an array. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Gunning]

And here is the run with the new velociraptors:

I'm happy!