RAID stripe dimension...

[Guest]

Hi All! This is my first post in this forum...

I got a qestion about RAID configurations: i got a Promise FastTrack IDE RAID controller and 2 HD in RAID 0.
My question is: "What is the 'right' size of the stripe????"
I want hte maximum performances under Windows98.
Now i've a stripe of 32K and the "Server" option in the "Auto" menu, is 64K.
In Windows, i have a lot of small files... maybe 32 is more "powerful" than 64k.

Someone can dissolve my trouble? 64? 32? Or something else?!??!!? :?


(yeah... i know... i got a terrible english... sorry! 😀)

Thanks!

________________
Uzi[WNCT]

 

[Guest]

This really is only an issue with RAID 3 and RAID 5 although it might help some if you have a primary/slave setup and are working with large files, but I don't know that for sure. In this case idealy, you would like your stripe size be about the size of the files you are working with. The problem with a general system is you work with all sizes of files in all kinds of applications. So you'd pick a happy medium so you didn't always have to read associated blocks in the stripe for rewriting the parity block.

But again in this case, there is no parity block. Writes may be a little better if you know you won't work with large files, but the difference between 32 and 64 would be nominal improvement on a RAID 0 setup. And if you set it lower to something like 8kb then the moment you start working with significantly larger files you probably will hinder write performance.

From a read stand point, it doesn't really matter at all. Sequentially, one of the disk finds a file and both go to down. Given 4 or 8kb clusters how many can you fit in a 32 or 64kb stripe? Not that many. You can use 32 but it won't be that big a difference.


***Hey I run Intel... but let's get real***