Windows 7 RAID question and results

Tyrsonswood · Feb 7, 2011, 03:22 AM

I was putting together my ECS Phenom X4 system a week or so ago and decided to try Windows native "Create Striped Volume" RAID 0 when partitioning the hard drives instead of using the motherboard's SATA RAID capabilities. I was kind of thinking "It's Microsoft... how good could it be?" and figured I would end up going the mobo hardware route eventually.

So far I've been pleasantly surprised at the speed and some of the benchmarks I've run. It's for the most part as fast running the two Seagate 7200.11 500gig drives using Windows RAID as I'm getting from the Corsair SSD boot drive I have in the system...... Other than the boot drives "WOW factor" on Windows start

some of the numbers from Chrystal Diskmark on the RAID volume are just about as "WOW"! I've got an XP box with the same motherboard, Athlon II, 2 gigs of RAM and a pair of Hitachi drives that I will be using the mobo RAID for, so I will get some idea of how that runs also (but that's not exactly apples to apples comparison)

I was impressed enough that when I upgraded my main system (<<< in specs) to an OCZ Vertex2 yesterday I did the same with the Seagate 7200.12 drives I have in there, but added a slight twist to the setup. I made two striped volumes with those drives, the main volume 900+ gig and a 12gig striped volume that I use for swapfile only....... Snappy

Question is...... By letting windows handle this is there a CPU performance hit that I wouldn't see if I were to use the motherboard capability? or am all I'm missing is the cute little icon in the tool tray for the RAID management utility?

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Jac · Feb 7, 2011, 08:14 AM

I have two cheap 80gb disks in my system and I bought a matched pair to specifically try RAID0 - I found the performance difference to be pretty negligible. I too am getting a Corsair c300 which by my reckoning should be at least 6 times faster than these disks

mkk · Feb 7, 2011, 09:08 AM

Windows's own striping isn't bad at all really, considering that the common raid interfaces sitting on motherboards aren't really so very "hardware raid" anyway. Windows striping/mirroring is simpler to set up too. I've seen no difference in CPU usage between the two, then of course only the simpler striping and mirroring modes are available this way.

Tyrsonswood · Feb 7, 2011, 01:26 PM

I've got a Sans Digital box if I need the more complicated RAID levels, at the moment it has 4 500gig drives running 0+1 and is being used for my home network backups and archiving.... My individual systems don't need anything but RAID 0......

@ Jac I've got a set of 80gig MAXTOR on another system (SATA 1.5) and they aren't really much faster in RAID than when used individually. They are using the motherboard's RAID. Older tech doesn't respond as well I think.

mkk · Feb 7, 2011, 11:33 PM

I got inspired and gave it a shot to stripe two of my HD204UI(Samsung 2TB) drives together simply because I had space to move what little was on them off to a third. I got a wee bit of a surprise when although benching looked fine and copying files performed likewise, running a game(CoD 4) off the striped pair started up maps 25% slower than a single drive. Since access times are typically a little bit worsened by striping I would have understood if the game loading didn't improve, but 25% worse? I was baffled but accepted the results after having rebuilt the striping once using the controller this time and got the exact same result. The striped pair clocked in at 23 seconds in the test and all three individual drives at just about 18 seconds. As individuals these "green" drives have been performing well enough for lighter games, much better than I had expected. Other than mirroring for added security or striping squarely for transfer speed, RAID might not be for the greens.

In the end this is just as well, so that I'm kept off running a risky stripe of two 2TB drives just for fun.

Tyrsonswood · Feb 8, 2011, 12:01 AM

I haven't tried any gaming since setting these up, to be honest, so I'm not sure what to expect. Of course these Seagates are not 2tb and not "green" either but that may not be a factor in what you've discovered.

Judas · Feb 8, 2011, 04:14 PM

I've tried it.. and found it performed poorly in comparison to a near identical striping on a Intel ICH10R

Just take a gander at my 6.2 score using mechanical 750gb 32mb cache (2x) or the 640gb 64mb cache (2x) drives in windows 7..

after searching around.. seems most if not all of the other mechanical drives generally don't score over 5.9 even in raid.... my case is an apparent exception.

Now this also appears to show better results in data transfers too.

Tyrsonswood · Feb 8, 2011, 04:38 PM

But Windows favors Intel........ I'm running AMD so it's not apples to apples.

Tyrsonswood · Feb 9, 2011, 04:01 AM

Ran "Grid" for a few hours and it's never loaded faster, saved faster or even looked smoother during replay and game play..... Haven't tried any of the other driving games I've got yet. So far though, looks like it's working here. The games are on the RAID drive, OS only on SSD, Swap file on it's own partition on the RAID drives, using Windows striping.

Tyrsonswood · Feb 9, 2011, 11:25 PM

Interesting side note: Not to drag this way out of Win7 land, but I figured out how to do this in XP last night. Never knew that was available in XP as well. Actually pull some good numbers there also. Hmmm

Feb 7, 2011, 08:14 AM	#2
Jac HardwareHeaven Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: England Posts: 769 Rep Power: 51 System Specs	Re: Windows 7 RAID question and results I have two cheap 80gb disks in my system and I bought a matched pair to specifically try RAID0 - I found the performance difference to be pretty negligible. I too am getting a Corsair c300 which by my reckoning should be at least 6 times faster than these disks

Feb 7, 2011, 09:08 AM	#3
mkk Cthulhu/Dagon 2012 Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Gefle, Sweden Posts: 4,495 Rep Power: 132 System Specs	Re: Windows 7 RAID question and results Windows's own striping isn't bad at all really, considering that the common raid interfaces sitting on motherboards aren't really so very "hardware raid" anyway. Windows striping/mirroring is simpler to set up too. I've seen no difference in CPU usage between the two, then of course only the simpler striping and mirroring modes are available this way.

Feb 7, 2011, 11:33 PM	#5
mkk Cthulhu/Dagon 2012 Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Gefle, Sweden Posts: 4,495 Rep Power: 132 System Specs	Re: Windows 7 RAID question and results I got inspired and gave it a shot to stripe two of my HD204UI(Samsung 2TB) drives together simply because I had space to move what little was on them off to a third. I got a wee bit of a surprise when although benching looked fine and copying files performed likewise, running a game(CoD 4) off the striped pair started up maps 25% slower than a single drive. Since access times are typically a little bit worsened by striping I would have understood if the game loading didn't improve, but 25% worse? I was baffled but accepted the results after having rebuilt the striping once using the controller this time and got the exact same result. The striped pair clocked in at 23 seconds in the test and all three individual drives at just about 18 seconds. As individuals these "green" drives have been performing well enough for lighter games, much better than I had expected. Other than mirroring for added security or striping squarely for transfer speed, RAID might not be for the greens. In the end this is just as well, so that I'm kept off running a risky stripe of two 2TB drives just for fun.