# raptor raid comparo



## cdawall (Nov 20, 2008)

i managed to get ahold of several raptors for myself and raided them. figured i would post the results to show the hype on them.


here is the drive i'm going to use a benchmark it's a seagate 7200.10 320GB firmware 3.AAE







now for the raptors

*single *raptor i ran it on 2 of them forgot on the 3rd

both had the same average read so don't be worried about it











*dual *raptor on NV controller 64k stripe






*tri *raptor on NV controller 64k stripe






comparo






now what does that mean?

that for about $100 i got 100GB of reasonably fast drive. but only a 30% average read gain isn't enough to really come home bragging about

access time is also about 34-40% faster so again no huge gains


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## {JNT}Raptor (Nov 20, 2008)

Hmmm...heres my 36gig Raptors In Raid for comparison.....your cpu usage seems alittle high.


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## DaMulta (Nov 20, 2008)

Some one get fit in here with his new 6 drive SDD setup and get them compared!!!


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## cdawall (Nov 20, 2008)

im going to try diff size stripes whats best performance wise right now i'm running 64k


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## {JNT}Raptor (Nov 20, 2008)

I've always heard 16kb clusters with a 16k stripe Is a good combo.


Hope it helps.


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## James1991 (Nov 20, 2008)

DaMulta said:


> Some one get fit in here with his new 6 drive SDD setup and get them compared!!!



6 SSD's


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## farlex85 (Nov 20, 2008)

Access time is where they shine. Read/write speeds are fairly normal (for high end).


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## cdawall (Nov 20, 2008)

added that to my graphs


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## DOM (Nov 20, 2008)

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 

8mb test






32mb test


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## oily_17 (Nov 20, 2008)

Here is mine with 2 x Raptor74Gb. 

Your read speed seems to be jumping from 1 till 2 drives.


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## Deleted member 3 (Nov 20, 2008)

Some things:


Production date of the Raptors? ie what generation are they?
Access time is far better, that's what you're paying for. Data throughput isn't that interesting in most cases.
Use an actual RAID controller
Those graphs look retarded, find out the cause, ie bad disk, crap controller, whatever.


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## Homeless (Nov 20, 2008)

the first generation raptors are slower than today's regular hard drives


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## KBD (Nov 20, 2008)

Homeless said:


> the first generation raptors are slower than today's regular hard drives



yea, u guys may want to do velociraptors instead. I just got 2 74GB veloci and will be posting results soon on ICH9R controller (dont have a RAID card yet) and also comparing em to 2 Barracudas 7200.10 in RAID so stay tuned.


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## DaMulta (Nov 20, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Some things:
> 
> 
> Production date of the Raptors? ie what generation are they?
> ...



whats a good one for the money that is pci-e? 
actual RAID controller


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## KBD (Nov 20, 2008)

DaMulta said:


> whats a good one for the money that is pci-e?
> actual RAID controller



Dell Perc/5i, i think they have models that are both SATA and SAS. There are also some good Adaptec and LSI controllers, dont remember exact models but checkout newegg reviews.


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## {JNT}Raptor (Nov 20, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Some things:
> [*]Those graphs look retarded, find out the cause, ie bad disk, crap controller, whatever.
> [/list]





I was thinking It was his controller.......plus his CPU usage Is on the high side....could be his controller tying It up.

Personally I've never liked Nvidia raid controllers.......come to think of it on all of the Nvidia RAID controllers I've used In the past their CPU usage was always in the double digits......coincidence.....or just crap controllers...who knows.


Hope it helps.


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## REVHEAD (Dec 2, 2008)

Dont know what you guys are doing but these are my results on 2x7200.11 seagates 500gb
and ich10 controller, Nvidia raid ruins drive performance. 

Enjoy I certainlly do.


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## allen337 (Dec 2, 2008)

3-wd 36gig raptors raid 0 ich10 ~  http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/2349/hdtachrd1.jpg       .


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## KBD (Dec 2, 2008)

REVHEAD said:


> Dont know what you guys are doing but these are my results on 2x7200.11 seagates 500gb
> and ich10 controller, Nvidia raid ruins drive performance.
> 
> Enjoy I certainlly do.



is this a joke? Those numbers are way off, i think.


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## niko084 (Dec 2, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Some things:
> 
> 
> Production date of the Raptors? ie what generation are they?
> ...



Crap controller, I see the same results with onboard n-raid all the time.

The throughput isn't that much better, the access times are amazing.
MTBF is really good also.

Is it worth the money realistically if you have no need for them beyond heh its quicker, not really.


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## REVHEAD (Dec 3, 2008)

KBD said:


> is this a joke? Those numbers are way off, i think.



No joke
 I have had a X38,X48 and P45 board all using the ICH9 or ICH10 controller and allmost identical results with each system, the only numbers that are off are with a Nvidia raid fullstop sorry. Nvida raid suturates the PCI bus, Intel raid does not, any one remember the old NVIDIA overclocking and raid corruption fiasco?>

 BTW my raid is Raid 0, coupled with DDR3 1866mhz and games load in seconds.

 My old noisy 7200.10s were abismle in raid 0 compared to the 11s


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## thebeephaha (Dec 3, 2008)

KBD said:


> Dell Perc/5i, i think they have models that are both SATA and SAS. There are also some good Adaptec and LSI controllers, dont remember exact models but checkout newegg reviews.



The Perc 5/i is SATA & SAS, it usually takes a 256MB cache module but can use 512MB.

I paid $225 for the card, backup battery, and 512MB cache, and two breakout cables.


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## Hayder_Master (Dec 3, 2008)

still ssd best chose


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## {JNT}Raptor (Dec 4, 2008)

REVHEAD said:


> Dont know what you guys are doing but these are my results on 2x7200.11 seagates 500gb
> and ich10 controller, Nvidia raid ruins drive performance.
> 
> Enjoy I certainlly do.



Hmmm.....No Offense...but if your Raid drive was pushing 3000+mb's of throughput....the drives would melt methinks.

Gotta be a glitch in the software....or some sort of anomaly.....I don't have the answer.....but IMO theres NO way any standard HD's even in RAID could push that kind of data.

Could be wrong.....If so....gonna be buying me some of those drives.


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## KBD (Dec 4, 2008)

{JNT}Raptor said:


> Hmmm.....No Offense...but if your Raid drive was pushing 3000+mb's of throughput....the drives would melt methinks.
> 
> Gotta be a glitch in the software....or some sort of anomaly.....I don't have the answer.....but IMO theres NO way any standard HD's even in RAID could push that kind of data.
> 
> Could be wrong.....If so....gonna be buying me some of those drives.



i also think that those speeds are not possible, may be the software is reading it wrong.


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## thebeephaha (Dec 4, 2008)

KBD said:


> i also think that those speeds are not possible, may be the software is reading it wrong.



Intel RAID can do that for bursts. Write back cache is enabled.


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## REVHEAD (Dec 4, 2008)

Burst speed doesnt really matter 2 much with day to day machines especially when mine is just used for gaming, but these results are 100% correct, what should be noted is the sequential read speeds and average read speeds these are what give good results, were Raptors shine due to there high RPM and smaller platter sizes are the random access times.


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## Deleted member 3 (Dec 4, 2008)

{JNT}Raptor said:


> Hmmm.....No Offense...but if your Raid drive was pushing 3000+mb's of throughput....the drives would melt methinks.
> 
> Gotta be a glitch in the software....or some sort of anomaly.....I don't have the answer.....but IMO theres NO way any standard HD's even in RAID could push that kind of data.
> 
> Could be wrong.....If so....gonna be buying me some of those drives.



Read better. That 3GB+/s is burst, which is quite correct. Some onboard controllers use system RAM as cache. So there isn't some SATA or PCI(e/x) bus in between.


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## {JNT}Raptor (Dec 4, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Some onboard controllers use system RAM as cache. So there isn't some SATA or PCI(e/x) bus in between.



That I did not know...thank you for clearing that up Dan....and not toooo roasty in the process as well.


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## newtekie1 (Dec 4, 2008)

Here is my 3 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11's in RAID 5 on my Highpoint controller:

32mb:





8mb:





I love the constant speed across the entire drive.

cdawall, those RAID graphs look seriously messed up.  Even for an onboard.  My nVidia RAID gave me pretty similar results as the dedicated card.  The graph should still be a relatively smooth line(or curve), it shouldn't jump up and down like that.



DaMulta said:


> whats a good one for the money that is pci-e?
> actual RAID controller



I use a HighPoint RocketRAID 2300.  It is PCI-E x1, they have a PCI-E x4 version(2310) also.  It is cheap, but a decent controller.  It has some minor issues though.  Mainly, it takes forever to time-out during POST if you don't have a drive connected to all 4 SATA connectors.  I really wish they would add an option to change the time-out for detecting drives, because right now it take 30 seconds.  And the driver that came with it didn't support Windows Vista x64.  It installed fine, warned that it wasn't digitally signed, but installed anyway.  Then when I rebooted, Vista refused to boot because the driver wasn't digitally signed.  It wouldn't even boot into safe mode since storage controller drivers are still loaded in safe mode.  So I had to boot into BartPE and delete the driver dll file Vista was bitching about, then boot into Vista and install the updated driver from HighPoint's site. Other than that, I haven't had any issues with it.


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## Xazax (Dec 4, 2008)

SO what do you guys think is better having a RAID controller? even a cheap one, or using on-board motherboard RAID capabilities


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## Deleted member 3 (Dec 4, 2008)

I should be receiving three 1.5TB drives as well somewhere before the end of time. The shop said they'd ship them today or at latest tomorrow, haven't heard a thing today though. So I won't have them before Monday. They'll be sitting on an Adaptec controller (6 port, PCI-X, SATA-150). I don't expect the SATA ports to limit performance in any way. 

I find the 118MB/s you're getting in RAID 5 very unimpressive though. I expect slightly higher performance. Then again it won't matter much as the Gbit network will be limiting. Care to tell me what Highpoint controller it is? 

Also, your performance seems to be stuck at 120MB/s, is it on a PCI bus?


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## newtekie1 (Dec 4, 2008)

It is on a HighPoint 2300, PCI-E x1 card.  For RAID 5 performance, I'm happy with it.


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## Deleted member 3 (Dec 4, 2008)

newtekie1 said:


> It is on a HighPoint 2300, PCI-E x1 card.  For RAID 5 performance, I'm happy with it.



Well, considering it's unlikely that you use the array for anything but storage it's surely acceptable. Specially when used over LAN. Still, higher speed = more bragging rights


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## niko084 (Dec 4, 2008)

newtekie1 said:


> It is on a HighPoint 2300, PCI-E x1 card.  For RAID 5 performance, I'm happy with it.



The PCI-E x1 might have something to do with that along with the bandwidth of the controller itself may.

But as long as its fast enough for you that's all that matters.


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## newtekie1 (Dec 4, 2008)

Yeah, it is purely a storage drive, the only reason I am running RAID 5 is for the redundancy.


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## allen337 (Dec 5, 2008)

Are you able to setup 2 raid arrays on pci-pci-e raid controllers? Ive found a big gain in speed of raid if you setup raid 5 using about 10-15% of total storage space as your operating system, setting up another raid for storage after the operating system is installed.


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## p3n1x420 (Dec 5, 2008)

for what its worth heres my raptor raid setup

74gb raptors, on my intel ich-10 raid 0


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## allen337 (Dec 5, 2008)

Youneed to go to intel website and download the latest Intel Matrix storage manager, the go to start-programs-intel matrix storage manager and open it, then click advanced view, then right click the array and select Turn on write back cache. Retest them raptors then.  ALLEN


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## p3n1x420 (Dec 5, 2008)

HOLY SHIT!!!!!

i did what you said, and NOW look at my results, simply amazing!


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## thebeephaha (Dec 5, 2008)

^ Not that amazing.

Burst is high but the sustained. Eh. Sorry I'm not excited.

Dell Perc 5/i SAS RAID: RAID0 4x80GB Raptors (WD800GD)





Dell Perc 5/i SAS RAID: RAID5 4x750GB Hitachi 7K1000 (HDS721075KLA33)


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## allen337 (Dec 6, 2008)

He just need to get the drives fragged a bit and rerun the test. If he used raid 5 it would be around 180 sustained. I can go over 200 sustained in raid 5 on 3 drives with 2500+ bursts speeds. Why would I pay $300 for a controller card that does less?


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## Xazax (Dec 6, 2008)

Hey quick question, do more drives, say in RAID 0 provide better performance, like 2 Raptors v 4 Raptors?


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## KBD (Dec 6, 2008)

Xazax said:


> Hey quick question, do more drives, say in RAID 0 provide better performance, like 2 Raptors v 4 Raptors?



thats actually a good question, i would think it depends on the controller and not the number of drives. and with 4 drives RAID 5 is prolly better due to redundancy.


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## REVHEAD (Dec 7, 2008)

Xazax said:


> Hey quick question, do more drives, say in RAID 0 provide better performance, like 2 Raptors v 4 Raptors?



For benchmarks yes, for real world performance no, your seek times will go through the roof, as well as your exspenses.

 I have had 4 hdds raid in the past and while I thought it was cool, in reality is was not as good as I thought, so I switched to 2 Hdds and got way better seeektimes. Allso the risk of a hardrive failing with 4 greatly increases.

 Seek times for pple like us who just use our machines for gaming ect are what we are after, the lower the better, so unless your moving terabytes of data everyday then 2 hardrives are more than enough.

 If you feel like experimenting them go right ahead, but you wont notice it , and sometimes things like games actually load slower with 4x hardrives .



> Seek time
> From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> Jump to: navigation, search
> Seek time is one of the three delays associated with reading or writing data on a computer's disk drive, and somewhat similar for CD or DVD drives. The others are rotational delay and transfer time, and their sum is access time. In order to read or write data in a particular place on the disk, the read/write head of the disk needs to be physically moved to the correct place. This process is known as seeking, and the time it takes for the head to move to the right place is the seek time. Seek time for a given disk varies depending on how far the head's destination is from its origin at the time of each read or write instruction; usually one discusses a disk's average seek time.


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## thebeephaha (Dec 7, 2008)

REVHEAD said:


> For benchmarks yes, for real world performance no, your seek times will go through the roof, as well as your exspenses.



My seek times did not go up. But my wallet did go broke. Real world load times did get faster too, especially on games or opening large applications like CS4 or something.

You need a good controller to keep seek times in check.


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## oily_17 (Dec 7, 2008)

Yeah with onboard controllers ...real world you will see little improvement..2x Raptor's suits me just fine.


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## Xazax (Dec 7, 2008)

so would the ICH10R be just fine? i purchased CDawall's 3, 36GB Raptors with intend on RAID 0 Array


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## thebeephaha (Dec 7, 2008)

The 10 is good for onboard, in fact it's VERY good for an onboard. Should be fine.


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## KBD (Dec 7, 2008)

allen337 said:


> Youneed to go to intel website and download the latest Intel Matrix storage manager, the go to start-programs-intel matrix storage manager and open it, then click advanced view, then right click the array and select Turn on write back cache. Retest them raptors then.  ALLEN



darn, i didnt know about this. i just turned it on like u sed and retested 2 320Gb Barracudas 7200.11 on ICH9R controller and got the insane burst speeds as well. thnx for the tip


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## REVHEAD (Dec 28, 2008)

Ok got sick of you guys making me jelous with these Veloci Raptor things, and well I dont see a future for SSD and me for sometime, so I got a pair  of 80GB Veloci Raptors in raid 0, I am enjoying the seektimes, and I cant beleive how quite they are compared to my Seagates.


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## KBD (Dec 28, 2008)

REVHEAD said:


> Ok got sick of you guys making me jelous with these Veloci Raptor things, and well I dont see a future for SSD and me for sometime, so I got a pair  of 80GB Veloci Raptors in raid 0, I am enjoying the seektimes, and I cant beleive how quite they are compared to my Seagates.



yea, my 74gb veloci in RAID 0 results are about the same as yours also.


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## REVHEAD (Feb 10, 2009)

Just got myself another 2 x 80gb Velociraptors this brings my Radi 0 up to 4x Vraptor Drives, I am impressed, not bad for a Onboard Controller and 2 of my drives have an older Firmware, hopefully when I update the two my graph should smooth out.

 Two drives have U0 firmware and the other two have U1.


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## 3dsage (Feb 10, 2009)

^Admirable dude, I think I will get me a pair of V-Raptors when my Tax chek comes in.


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## DRDNA (Feb 10, 2009)

heres mine with the drives in my sig 4x320 raid0


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## 3dsage (Feb 10, 2009)

Those V-Raptors are killer. That burst speed is off the charts.

Idk what Intel ich controllers do but that is insane. I could barely hit 250 MB/s Burst with this AMD 750SB 3x WD 40GB in RAID 0. Although my average read is better than with ICH 9 controller.


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## allen337 (Feb 11, 2009)

REVHEAD said:


> Just got myself another 2 x 80gb Velociraptors this brings my Radi 0 up to 4x Vraptor Drives, I am impressed, not bad for a Onboard Controller and 2 of my drives have an older Firmware, hopefully when I update the two my graph should smooth out.
> 
> Two drives have U0 firmware and the other two have U1.






Nice very nice


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## GypsyGhost (Mar 4, 2009)

REVHEAD said:


> Just got myself another 2 x 80gb Velociraptors this brings my Radi 0 up to 4x Vraptor Drives, I am impressed, not bad for a Onboard Controller and 2 of my drives have an older Firmware, hopefully when I update the two my graph should smooth out.
> 
> Two drives have U0 firmware and the other two have U1.




I also have different 80GB Velociraptors with different Firmwares, 2 with U1 fw and 1 with U0. The U0 which is the older and the U1 which I believe is being manufactured with VR's from December 08 till now. I did notice a difference in the way they read and write. When compaing the two, the U0 firmware test is almost a straight line from start to finish, and the U1 is kinda curved all over the place, but the performance is about the same. I'm just wondering if it's a good thing to mix VR's with different firmware revisions.

REVHEAD do you have benchmarks of each drive individually?


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## REVHEAD (Mar 16, 2009)

I am sorry for my late reply, some one hacked into my account and changed my account password and email so I wasnt able to use the forums for a few weeks.

 Testing each drive seperatly I havnt been able to do because I went straight to raid 0 when I received my drives.


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## thebeephaha (Mar 19, 2009)

Eight 74GB Raptors in RAID0 on my Perc 5/i with 512MB Cache

The array is running 256KB stripe size.

SSDs, meh, I can wait. 

Now if I had a better controller card I can imagine that number would be higher.


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## MoonPig (Mar 19, 2009)

two words, BLOODY HELL. This makes me what RAID!!!!

How much was the Dell PERC?


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## thebeephaha (Mar 19, 2009)

The Perc has dropped in price since I bought mine, saw one as a complete set with cables and battery for like $150 the other day.


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## REVHEAD (Mar 23, 2009)

8 is insane thebeebhaha nice work.


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