RAID0 stripe size....

[Cej]

Okay,....
so my system is set up with an 120GB SSD with the operating system (Win7 x64 = C: drive) on it, and have raid0 on 2 x 1TB HDD (=2TB) with 4 partitions, these will have all my projects, libraries & presets, audio samples, data on them (I will be backing up to external RAID1 so redundancy I not too concerned about)

If anyone is using a raid array,...
- What stripe sizes are you using for your partitions?
- Have you tried different stripe sizes? (what did you find out?)
- Are you mainly using midi, audio samples or both? (I think this is important because audio files are generally larger than midi, thus will govern the stripe sizes)

Cheers in advance,
Cej

[mode:masters]

Usually the default is 128kb block sizes for the stripe, this will be fine in 90% of cases, unless the PC is actually a server and contains alot of massive files or tons and tons and tons of very small files. You will not see much difference at all on a regular desktop PC if you change this, so I highly recommend leaving it at the default setting for your controller.

As far as the type of data you are storing on your array, I seriously hope you have some kind of REGULAR backup schedule happening. When you do striped RAID with 2 drives you DOUBLE the likelihood of a physical failure (drive dying), therefore your data is very susceptible to becoming corrupted because you cannot retrieve data from a failed striped array.

So it is very risky keeping all your projects on the striped array. You get a speed boost, but trust me, the day will come when your array fails and you lose everything. You're actually FAR better off installing your OS on the striped array and keeping your data on un-striped or MIRRORED arrays (RAID 5 even better).

[Trent]

Since you have 3 1TB drives you could have done a small raid 5! I've have never trusted a stripe. I have seen them fail too many times. But then again those failures were on IDE, SCSI, and Sata...You might have luck with it on SSD!

[twisted-space]

128k is generally ok.
But don't bother with raid 0 unless you have a harware raid controller, in which case buy another drive and use raid 5 instead.