[asweeba]

hello, I have a computer with raid-0 controlled double raptor HDDs and i have a cruddy 80 gig 5400. windows sp2 is on the old hard drive and i was wondering that if i reinstalled it onto the raid drives, would my pc boot faster?

[Mumbodog]

It should,

1. you are going from 5400 to 10,000 rpm

2. and you are going raid 0 (stripped)

3. also depends on the motherboard and raid chipset, memory size and speed, how much of an increase you will get, but at the minimum you will not be disappointed.

4. Just going from 5400 to 7200 will be a very noticeable difference in boot time and system performance.

5. Some raid 0 chipset bios utilities allow you to set the stripe size, most are default 64, I use 128 on my system, seemed to perform faster. Stripe size means how large the chunks of data are that are split between the 2 drives. If the stripe size is 64kb, and you write a file to the raid array that is 128kb, the raid controller will write the file in two chunks of 64kb, one chunk on each drive, if there is odd data left over that is under 64kb, it will write that to only one drive. It does not matter how big the file is, it will be split up into 64kb chunks until it either has no remaining 64kb chunks or has one last chunk less than 64kb. So it is a matter of testing to see what stripe size will benefit your situation the most, 128 is a good start imho.

6. Setting stripe size has to be done before installing the OS, when you set up the raid array using the bios utility, and cannot be changed afterwords, so experimenting with this setting requires the clean re-install of the OS each time you wish to change the stripe size.

don't forget XP likes at least 1gb memory to run well.

[Dan O]

Raid 0 is disk mirroring, which is generally slower. Raid 5 is generally faster, which is spreaded across 3 or more drives.

[Mumbodog]

Raid 0 is stripped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redunda...ependent_disks

"RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed and full capacity, but all data on all disks will be lost if any one disk fails. "

[asweeba]

ok thanks, nut my raid controller allows me to access it's array during the bios. are you sure you can't change the stripe size without cleaning it?

[Mumbodog]

are you sure you can't change the stripe size without cleaning it?

yes.

[Dan O]

Mumbodog,

You are correct, I was thinking about raid-1, which I use on all my servers. Raid-0 stripping does provide some improvement in performance.