Hi, I'm getting another WD Velociraptor 150GB for a RAID 0 array but I am a newbie and I'm not sure about volumes, stripe and cluster sizes. I also read that optimal stripe/cluster ratio for gaming should be 4:1 with a stripe width of two. I'm thinking of making four partitions: 1. 60GB for the OS (Windows 7) 2. 70GB for games 3. 30GB probably for a Linux dualboot (Fedora 12) 4. Rest of the space for movies and stuff. How's the dualboot with RAID 0 anyway? Currently I have paging file on its own partition on a separate disk that has also my games on it and is almost as fast as Velociraptor, therefore is there any benefit having the paging file on its own partition with RAID 0? Should I make second volume for the games partition to use different stripe and cluster sizes? I have ICH10R if it makes any difference. And stripe and cluster sizes, I Need to find a balance between performance and disk fragmentation in order to get a fast booting computer that loads maps fast in games => writes and reads fast and so that the whole partition won't get fragmented when installing a game on it as it does with 4kb cluster size. And don't worry, I have a Seagate 7200.11 500GB for backups in case of a disk failure. ;^) Any suggestions?
nice drives, ive heard. i can tell you that i have my spinpoints configured for stripe of 128k , with two seperate volumes in raid then i broke down one of the volumes into two partitions. not telling you it has to be this way, just how i did it. (but 128k is supposed to be a good gen. purpose size) as for your partition for linux keep in mind you will need about three (right?) partitions to have a succesful linux i recommend you keep your paging file on a separate drive, especially if its pretty fast, too. that keeps random disk writes down. last but not least, save your precious data (game saves, movies, backups, etc.) onto your seagate. but dont worry, because ive had raid 0 on my comp for at least 10 months and have had only one failure, which was like 5 or more ago.
I don't want to move the paging file off the RAID cause I'm going to sell the disk currently holding it. Need more suggestions and answers!
If you are using the onboard RAID, then you would probably be better off without RAID. RAID0 is non-redundant, with more than twice the failure rate of a single drive. On top of this, software RAID0 is far less reliable that hardware RAID0...and array loss can happen without hardware failure. If reliability is not a concern, you should also know that the speed of a software RAID0 is typicaly slower than a single drive from the set running without RAID...initial testing typicaly shows great speed on software RAID0, but this speed is lost before you have finished installing an operating system. I think you would have better performance with this config: Drive 1: -Win7 Boot Partition -Linux Boot Partition Drive 2: -Win7 Swap file partition (a small partition at the beginning of the disk where you put pagefile.sys) -Linux Swap partition -Games Partition Once you lay those out, use the remaining space on the drives to make a couple of storage areas.
I also wouldn't bother at all with raid on a home setup.. it's only useful in huge drive arrays where striped raid does give a small access time improvement and dual redundancy.. running raid on one device is a waste of time and just causes huge latency with none of the advantages. I'm questioning the partitioning layout somewhat. I would use the 2 drives in a very different way. Swap areas work best on the busiest partition or drive.. so I would set up with one drive for windoze boot and swap and one drive linux boot and swap.. with the data partitions put anywhere you want. To my mind that would keep the swap on the busiest drives depending on which os was running, avoiding spinup and seek delays. BTW.. my linux partitioning scheme is /boot /root /swap /home /var and /tmp .. because I'm old skool unix and it helps to stop junk temp files and odd setup/modify data cluttering everything up... easy to find and clear out every once in a while.. I even ignore the 2xram for swap these days.. I haven't seen a 2.6 kernel swap more than 200mb's in the last couple of years, so I set for 500mb's and it doesn't cause any problems.. and that's doing video editing.. /home gets it's own drive.. always.. XD
Interesting... Or should I say "excellent" Seems that I've been fooled. Anyway I don't think that I need Linux swap since it doesn't use it the same way Windows does with paging file and besides I'm running with 6GB of DDR3. Can I even get GRUB working with Windows and Fedora on separate drives?
