My biggest bottleneck continues to be disk IO on long reads, like when zoning in WoW. I've got a full length 32Mb SCSI 3 RAID controller and fast drives in one of my old systems. It's really loud though and I can't get a full length card in my current (very quiet) case.
How well does SATA RAID perform compared to SCSI RAID when using stripe sets?
SATA RAID?
- Aabidano
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SATA RAID?
"Life is what happens while you're making plans for later."
- Aabidano
- Way too much time!
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- Joined: July 19, 2002, 2:23 pm
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I bought the RAID card a long time ago from Computer Geeks and put 32Mb of SDRAM cache and 3, 7200RPM, 50Gb SCSI 3 drives on it. I used to do some video editing and such, massive I\O rates were a big help both there and to a lesser extent playing games. The entire setup cost me about $125.
Popping into Org* and some other zones, I have to wait while "stuff" loads. I'd initially thought I needed more RAM (1Gb now) and it was swapping or something, but from watching the system it's just a long read while the graphics for all the new stuff load up after zoning. Zoning into a large group of folks in an instance will do almost the same thing, not as bad though.
I'm considering what to put in my next system, drives are cheap, if there's a decent performace gain might as well get two and stripe them.
Popping into Org* and some other zones, I have to wait while "stuff" loads. I'd initially thought I needed more RAM (1Gb now) and it was swapping or something, but from watching the system it's just a long read while the graphics for all the new stuff load up after zoning. Zoning into a large group of folks in an instance will do almost the same thing, not as bad though.
I'm considering what to put in my next system, drives are cheap, if there's a decent performace gain might as well get two and stripe them.
"Life is what happens while you're making plans for later."
Dunno if you'll see that much w/ the on-board raid, it's all software drivers and hence, shite.
Now.. if you fork out $300 for an adaptec 2410SA and 3 or 4 drives in RAID5, data transfer rates are very nice... I think the lame test I did was copying 4Gb of files from one directory to the other on the same set of 3 disks in about 5 minutes
Not sure what the performance of them in RAID0 would be... still a lot better than the onboard stuff though.
Now.. if you fork out $300 for an adaptec 2410SA and 3 or 4 drives in RAID5, data transfer rates are very nice... I think the lame test I did was copying 4Gb of files from one directory to the other on the same set of 3 disks in about 5 minutes

Not sure what the performance of them in RAID0 would be... still a lot better than the onboard stuff though.
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June 2005 - "The mission isn't easy, and it will not be accomplished overnight"
-- G W Bush, freelance writer for The Daily Show.