nice

 

VERY nice!

That leaves any southbridge controller completely in the dust.

 

That's nuts!!!

 

yep. I got 134.8 sustained with four WD KS 250GB drives (16MB cache)....

He beats me by about 40MB/s... and the PCI-E bus can clearly handle the bandwidth.

I am not even starting to discuss his burst

 

how much was the controller card? . . going to be one of my next upgrades

 

can you post some pics of your internal? wanna see how it looks like when the raid controller is hook up

 

thats like 20x me..

 

the controller card was $330, and supports up to 4 drives, and it supports RAID 0, 1, 10, 1E, 3, 4, 5, and JBOD.

As far the internals, Yeah, I'll try to get a pic of it later, but it's mostly just a massive mess of wires.

 

Here's a pic of the stuff inside the case.
The RAID controller is the one w/ the 4 SATA cables coming out of it

 

yum... spaghetti

I'd get some shorter SATA cables

 

get out !!! we having spaghetti tonight.... j/k

Very nice... Might have to get that card... How hard is to setup raid with it ?

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by demoship Here's a pic of the stuff inside the case. The RAID controller is the one w/ the 4 SATA cables coming out of it

LOL!! i cant see anything

 

AHH . . slade close you eyes!!. . . cables everywhere . .

wouldnt take too much work to clean up though.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by equetefue get out !!! we having spaghetti tonight.... j/k Very nice... Might have to get that card... How hard is to setup raid with it ?

Very easy.

Here's the steps (Basically)

1. Create driver disk w/ the bootable CD (you need a 3.5" floppy -- not included)
2. Create a RAID array w/ the BIOS on the card (it'll format it and all that stuff)
3. Install the RAID driver w/ the floppy disk you created

Done!

As far as the cables go, the airflow's still pretty good, so I don't have a problem with it

 

If you ever saw Sladesurfer's case you'd see the opposite end of the spectrum...no cables...no drives (well one).

Lol..that is some bandwidth there.

Can you feel the reponse on the desktop? Or is it all just in the numbers?

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by equetefue get out !!! we having spaghetti tonight.... j/k Very nice... Might have to get that card... How hard is to setup raid with it ?

It's the same process as setting up any RAID. Install drivers before OS. (assume OS will be on RAID).

Any chance of a RAID0 benchmark? 300MB/s?

 

I'm seriously thinking about doing that. Its a lot better than having a dedicated back-up drive.

 

Your computer is giving birth!! oh noes.

 

RAID 0 will perform better then this setup for writes, reads will be around the same.

And yes, I can feel the benefits of the array.

Windows installation took 10 minutes
Windows takes about 25 seconds to boot once it starts loading (The BIOS stuff and other initialization take maybe 15 seconds)
Installation of new programs happens unbelieveably fast as well

If you're spending 4K+ on top of the line everything, I'd definately say go for a card like this. Or if you have a need for data security, this is a great setup too. Manually copying files is a pain, and you forget to do it too.

 

holy, snake**** batman,wires everywhere

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by demoship I didn't think it was physically possible to read from drives at 600 MB/s (setup: 4X 250GB 7200 RPM drives w/ an Areca-1210)

The 600 MB/s is a burst speed, so it doesn't read that fast for long, as indicated by the fact that your average read is still under 180 MB/s. Regardless, those are excellent numbers! I just wish RAID controller cards weren't a bagillion dollars for a good one.

 

get this one!!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816151006

this one can handle 24 hdds... that would make a crazy fast RAID 5!!! it also supports raid 6 which im not to sure if its better than RAID 5....

 

With 24 drives you'd want to set it up as a 23 drive RAID 6 + spare. And yes, it'd be insanely fast. RAID 6 will read at the same speed as RAID 5, and write just a tiny bit slower (Since with 23 drives, RAID 5 can effectively write to 22 drives + 1 parity bit, RAID 6 is writing to 21 drives + 2 parity bits), but with that many drives, you need to have 2 drive redundancy.

And a good controller isn't THAT much if you have a high end build. Instead of getting 2 8800GTXes, get 1 GTX and 1 $350 RAID Controller. Note that loads are very fast. Loading a new level in oblivion only takes about 3 seconds (it takes 2 seconds to get the first bit of the load, then the rest goes instantly)