Raid and FS2004

**Geoffrey** · 08-28-2003, 12:16 AM

Seems that a Raid system seriously slows down the computer, and is especially deleterious to FS2004 scenery function. A quick fix I found is to page to a very high speed external drive. This seriously speeds things up! Anyone else have a better idea?

**jclay13** · 08-28-2003, 01:12 AM

What level of RAID are you using? Level 0 (data striping) provides improved performance by spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disks. Level 1 (data mirroring) is when the data is written to two duplicate disks simultaneously and will be slower. I'm using RAID 0 and it works great.

**Leif** · 08-28-2003, 03:43 AM

raid built in windows, or on a PCI-card?

built in windows ie using dynamic disks and such would of course provide an overhead, I got no figures of performance hit though.

**Geoffrey** · 08-28-2003, 09:33 AM

I'm using a card that slaves a second disk to make a mirror image in realtime. Are there any external drives faster than 7200 rpm? And I wonder, would it make a difference?

**overloaded** · 08-28-2003, 09:32 PM

I'm about to do a motherboard upgrade. If I get a second HD (60 gb/133/7200) will it just allow faster performance in raid striping but not give me 120 mb total capacity? I haven't found an answer to this question, must be too obvious.

**jclay13** · 08-29-2003, 02:24 PM

>raid built in windows, or on a PCI-card?
>
>built in windows ie using dynamic disks and such would of
>course provide an overhead, I got no figures of performance
>hit though.

Not sure if this question was directed to me but I'll answer anyway. My motherboard has two raid controllers on it in addition to the two regular IDE controllers. One 40 GB disk is connected to one raid controller, and another 40 GB disk connected to the other raid controller. I then have the CD-ROM drive connected to one of the IDE controllers. I then have the appearance of one large 80 GB drive, but data is split up and written to both drives. That way instead of sending blocks of data down one pipe, it splits it up and sends half down one pipe and the other half down the other at the same time to speed up data reads and writes.

Geoffrey, sounds like you are mirroring your data which is definately going to be slower than if you were not using raid at all. Data mirroring is really only needed if you think you need a redundant backup of the data. Corporate servers use this and especially on mission critical data.

**jclay13** · 08-29-2003, 02:32 PM

Geoffrey,

You really don't want to do mirroring if you are not concerned about having a redundant backup of your hard drive and if you use your machine for gaming. The ideal thing to do is backup your data to another drive such as a burned CD, Zip disk, or hard disk used only as a data storage drive.

Do you know if the card you have will allow you to do data striping (RAID 0)? If so, use that and you will see a performance gain over having just one hard drive and it will definately be faster than mirroring (RAID 1) like you are currently doing.

**jclay13** · 08-29-2003, 02:39 PM

Overloaded, here's how it will work, assuming the motherboard you are upgrading supports data striping (RAID 0).

If you connect two 60 GB hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration, you will have 120 GB available for use. The ideal situation is to use drives that are identical in size and from the same manufacturer if possible.

If the motherboard has two RAID controllers, connect one drive as primary on one RAID controller and the other drive as primary on the other RAID controller. Then connect other drives such as CD or DVD or additional hard rives used for data backup to the other two IDE contollers.

**pc_fs** · 08-29-2003, 04:11 PM

>I'm using a card that slaves a second disk to make a mirror image in realtime. Are there any external drives faster than 7200 rpm? >And I wonder, would it make a difference?

I have seen 15,000rpm drives...

http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...40068c65ab.jpg